The need for open source projects in India

So you used the freely available codes to work on this cool startup idea of yours. You launched it, got positive feedback from your beta users, used more code to scale your product, raised a seed round of funding, you are growing very well, you are growing your tech team, each team member is consuming more and more freely available codes. You raised millions of funding. You are going well, at least from the tech side of your business. If you pause for a few seconds and think about how you have reached up to this stage of your product. You will find that the codes you used are the hard work of thousands of FOSS developers who dedicated their years, burned and exhausted, to build them which are available for everyone. I understand FOSS is available only to reuse, modify and for the public good, so of course, you can use it and everybody can use it. But here comes the part which our concern should be. The contribution part.

We must feel for those who have put their years of hard work to build those awesome tools and systems. They did for the public good itself. But the problem is we are not realizing it, we are only consuming it, not all are contributing to it.

In India, more than 3,200 startups raised $63 billion in funding in the last five and a half years alone. Out of which 32 startups are valued more than a billion-dollar already and 52 more potential startups to get added to that list[1].

So our concern should be the startups who are consuming the FOSS should be contributing as well for an innovative ecosystem. The research and innovation in the science field wouldn’t have evolved if scientists had kept their work secret. They believe it’s good for society altogether. I am not saying every startup should put their whole code in a public repository. But yeah a few tools will definitely help the ecosystem to bring some innovation in the ecosystem. Today 90% of the public clouds run on Linux[2]. What if Linus Torvalds and his team hadn’t open sourced the Linux kernel code?

There is a tale for the open-source community from the discovery of the structure of DNA, which I read from the book, “Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution”[3]. If Francis Crick and James Watson had succeeded to keep the secret of the discovery of the model of helical DNA finding, Linus Pauling or anybody won’t have been able to discover the structure of DNA that early. Watson later acknowledged that the progress of science may get delayed because of the keeping things disclosed due to the competitive environment. I think there is some learning from this? If medical researches had been kept secret from the rest of the world, I don’t think anybody would have been recovered from any disease.

By this time we have to realize that research and innovation are the only way out of any problem, we are facing on earth. Today, one of the biggest challenges to the world is Climatic change[4]. The answer to this threat is research and innovation (?) which will be easier if the technologists are using the technology at their best to help the Climate experts[5]. Technology can help us to educate how we should use natural resources wisely and avoid climate catastrophe[6].

FOSS ecosystem won’t fall weak if few companies/organizations stop contributing to it, but it will definitely if we all together keep consuming and stop contributing.