I am from India and this is how I started my career about 14 years back. I used to contribute bits and pieces to Drupal and other open source projects. Drupal was really new in India but also like globally.

I got my biggest clients (all over the world) from there, then got into Google SoC, contributed to Drupal Google GData plugin. Made lots of money (through consulting)*, lost all in bootstrapping, rest is history.