Question is above.. [:)]
I ask because I'm currently looking through the developers list on the site, and there's probably a few there that would be classed as independant game developers.
I would classify an independent developer if they:
Didn't have a publisher contract to develop games
Had another full time occupation - student or working other jobs as their primary source of income
Haven't made any money from games yet
Don't have an office or a full business registration etc
But yeah, you have to take these things with a grain of salt because not all indies fit all these criteria, such as those who have published games through publishers such as GarageGames, or gone through the shareware route etc.
I dunno how you'd define them, but I was browsing through the developer list for NSW and checking out their websites. They definitely seem much smaller than places such as irrational, torus and krome. To be honest I got the impression that those places were independent (IE just a few guys with small startup capital). But I suppose you can't judge it simply by it's web presence. I was pretty surprised at the lack of development houses in NSW considering our population size? :(
But you wouldn't call an established developer such as Ratbag (or any other?) an Independent, since they have published games with publishers, even though they may not at the moment be getting their funding from a publisher.
So really you can only be called "Independent" until you get your first publishing deal etc.
I suppose you could say they're not going the traditional publisher/developer relationship route and are funding their projects through their own means, sometimes self publishing and distributing.
The teams are usually very small (if not single person operations), generally having to keep the overhead as low as possible while working with little or no budget.