In December, when Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced a $1 million (about Rs4 crore) grant for innovative open-source projects at the Free and Open Source Software conference in Bangalore, it wasn’t the sort of news that makes headlines. Larger amounts have been committed before. Sun itself has spent almost $2 billion supporting open-source initiatives across the globe (open-source software makes the source code freely available).
But Simon Phipps, chief open-source officer at Sun, noted that while the competition is not limited to open-source programmers in India, he was announcing the award in India “because that’s where I expect the greatest open-source community growth to come from in the near future”.
Can India become the new vanguard of the open-source movement? So far, open-source has made headway in e-governance projects where the scale of operations is large.
Venkatesh Hariharan, co-founder of the Open Source Foundation of India, mentions the Maharashtra e-governance projects, where the preferred option was the open-source Linux operating system. “Open-source is a relatively new concept in India,” he says. “While it is fast gaining popularity, it is too early to expect it to be all-pervasive.”
In looking at the growth of open-source software in economies such as India, Kendall Whitehouse, Wharton’s senior director of information technology (IT), stresses that it is important to distinguish between two different aspects of its proliferation: how quickly the country will become a hotbed for open-source development and the rate at which Indian companies and governmental agencies will adopt the use of open-source software.
“Although these two issues are obviously interrelated, they differ in terms of their economic incentives” because open-source software is freely distributed. Whitehouse believes it is likely the adoption of open-source software by large firms may initially advance more rapidly than development efforts by Indian programmers although, he admits, “the one will follow the other.”
He adds that while some open-source advocates decry the option of using freely distributed code as the basis of a commercial product, the model may help facilitate open-source development efforts in emerging economies such as India.
Rajesh Jain, managing director of Mumbai-based Netcore Solutions Pvt. Ltd, points out that several large Internet companies “have elements of their IT infrastructure built using open-source, as do other organizations—big and small. From the perspective of developers, there is an altruistic approach to software, here. But that has also not stopped commercial companies from being created around open-source…. In the end, it’s a business model which is a win-win—for developers, IT firms and enterprises. And that’s why it has emerged as a formidable business model.”
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