IndiaOS and the State of Free Software

This article is about a conference that explores open source in all its complexity and omnipresence, and then again, it’s about something more. Open source has been a foundation for innovation and has provided tools to liberate knowledge in more ways than one can imagine. If you think open source is just for the closed circles of developers and hackers building software in and out, IndiaOS is a testament of how wrong the notion is. 

With the collective reliance on open source ever growing — for large teams, critical infrastructure like hospitals, rather the technology space in general — concerns around sustainability, practices, ethics and security are becoming more and more prominent. IndiaOS stands tall to address these.

IndiaOS is a humble event organised by the teams at Frappe and Zerodha to bring this conversation to the entire tech community. We aim to start a community beyond the closed circles, a platform for people to participate in a discussion that affects us all. 

IndiaOS is a volunteer driven conference for showcasing open source products, sharing stories and talking about its impact on society. The event, much like open source, is as good as we make it.

Why Freedom Matters

Free Software is focused on liberty, not price. Users are free to run, copy, distribute, study, change, and improve free software. Thus, “free software” is a matter of liberty, not price.

~ Richard Stallman, “What is Free Software”

The idea of free software stems from freedom and ownership, users (both individually and collectively) control the program and what it does for them. What this means is a small hospital in Somalia can use an HMIS for free, this also means that a school in Mumbai cannot be held “hostage” by software vendors for updates, features or for continued usage of the software. Code in public is auditable, that means software publishers cannot indulge in unethical practices. For example, a developer cannot employ privacy exploiting tracking mechanisms. Open source does not guarantee the “don’t be evil” mantra, but can be considered a mark of good spirit in that direction none the less. Here’s where a supportive yet just community plays a pivotal role in ensuring the sanctity of freedom provided by open source.

Open Source and India

There are over 2.8 million developers in India (StackOverflow Survey). In the past few years there has been a substantial growth in the number of new projects and contributions overall from countries like China, Nigeria, HongKong. However, India’s overall contribution to open source has been somewhat disappointing. 

Source: State of Octoverse

Despite a large fraternity of developers, institutions like IITs and other engineering colleges producing troupes of software and hardware engineers, India led initiatives in open source has always been less than stellar.

This was just about the code, there’s a philosophical dimension of it that manifests as conversations. India lacks quality open source events. While there are technology events like PyCon and JSFoo, which are fantastic places to talk about technology, FOSS communities go beyond just technology. FOSS is about creation and sharing of technology. There is a need to bring this community together, a community that can learn and inspire each other. 

India, and the world, needs more free and open source software. It leads to not only savings, but sharing is a super fast way to get solutions up and ready immediately. With the amount of open source tools already available, society should be doing so much more either as non profits or private or public entities.

IndiaOS Conference 2020

What was anticipated to be an event for just about 50 participants, the overwhelming response by the tech community required moving the venue from Zerodha Office at JP Nagar Bengaluru to Balan Farm Convention Center. At this place on 18th of January the first edition of IndiaOS was hosted.

Vasanthi Hall at the Balan Farm seemed to convey an impression of enormous, zestful excitement. The conference kick started with Rushabh laying the foundation for IndiaOS. He is the founder & CEO of Frappe Technologies, a self-taught developer who moved on to become the author and maintainer of ERPNext, which is today one of the world’s most popular ERP softwares with a community of more than 10,000 members.

Following this Dr. Kailash Nadh, the CTO at Zerodha presented his FOSS journey, he explained how open source software has been a significant contributor to the success of Zerodha. Speaking of his take on giving back to the community, Kailash briefly touched upon the Zerodha’s fund for FOSS initiatives. He also took the stage to show off some amazing projects by the zerodha team including ListMonk.

Tweet link: https://twitter.com/Nithin0dha/status/1218508895041146880

Chatwoot, a customer support application challenging the likes of Freshworks and Zendesk was showcased next by Pranav Raj. His was an inspiring journey, in a very candid talk, he told the audience about the origins of Chatwoot and why he rejected a lucrative acquisition offer. 

Sanket Sarang talked about BlobCityDB which is a database which unlike traditional databases has some amazing capabilities in indexing unconventional data types (like excel files, for example)

Shahidh, one of the founding engineers of Hasura, took the stage on behalf of Tanmai, their co-founder. Despite having only a day to prepare, Shahidh gave an exceptional talk about their work with GraphQL (an innovative new data querying language). Hasura allows you to build an API out of your traditional RDBMS with minimum configuration. Shahidh talked about his success story as an open source project and how focusing on building one thing, and doing it right led them to being the amazing community they are today.

After a wholesome lunch the audience moved to their seats for a talk by Abhas. Abhas Abhinav is the founder of DeepRoot Linux, a tinkerer in true sense, Abhas finds joy in liberating hardware. One device at a time at his one-person hardware development and consulting company Abhas is paving a way for open hardware in mainstream computing. His talk was the essence of this pursuit. You cannot have truly free software if the underlying hardware is not free. (P.S. “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer”)

Next was a talk by Mohammed Niyas, lead engineer at Gramener, a data science company with a deep love for open source softwarre. India has different kinds of geographical boundaries. And most of them don’t have official shapefiles for the map. His talk briefly covered the challenges of mapping India, on how to read and process the maps. He later showed us how they use their open source reshaper library to merge data across maps to create complex visualizations. 

Next, the Frappe team took the stage to talk about the projects they build. Shivam Mishra presented the powerful Frappe Framework, he talked about the unique approach Frappe takes in managing complexity when building large apps. He also showcased ERPNext, he briefly mentioned about the comprehensive list of modules in the product and 100% open source philosophy they follow. Later a short few slides brushed upon the JavaScript libraries published by the team at Frappe.

He was followed by Faris Ansari, he showed off the very first looks of Frappe Books a completely free and open source desktop accounting software built free of the cloud. Faris took the stage to introduce their new framework FrappeJS and the journey of building it along with Frappe Books.

Next up was MOSIP, a talk by Anadi Mishra. MOSIP is a modular and open source identity platform that helps user organisations such as Governments implement a digital, foundational ID in a cost effective way. It was built on the best practices brewed from implementing Aadhaar for India. This was an interesting talk in an unexpected way, the audience quickly and candidly raised their concerns about privacy, tracking citizens and how such a system can be misused. (Read more: Engaging MOSIP at IndiaOS)  

Open Source Success Story of Bagisto was the next talk presented by Saurav. Bagisto is a free open source platform used to build an e-commerce store. He talked about WebKul and their contributions to various open source projects. Apart from Bagisto, WebKul runs and organizes multiple community events and plans to grow their efforts even more than it is.

Everyone loves a story of a hero rescuing the day. Biswas’ was a story the audience instantly fell in love with. In a heartwarming talk, Biswas shared a beautiful story, a story of software transcending geographical boundaries and saving lives. In the month of August 2018, Kerala, the southernmost state of India, received 250% of normal rainfall, resulting in all of its 44 dams to be opened. Biswas started a website (keralarescue.in), written in Django. The main purpose of the site was effective collaboration and communication between authorities, volunteers and the public. The site was open source from Day 0. About 1500 developers and volunteers onboard our slack group in a couple of days. Within a week, the community united to forge a critical piece of software that saved thousands of lives.

Next, Anish Sheela from SMC talked about the handwriting recognition project that SMC has been building and used the stage to invite more volunteers to contribute. His talk was important as it touched upon a topic most people overlook. With the tremendous diversity in the languages we speak and write, localisation of software should get more attention than it gets today. Anish articulated this need extremely well.

Followed by a short tea break was the talk by Kiran Jonnalagadda, Co Founder & CTO - HasGeek. Kiran showed an interesting take, counter to the “Talk is cheap, show me the code” philosophy. He presented a case on why the Talk is equally important and then explained the Platform as a distribution model. Here a central installation has a brand name that is always visible, this is to ensure a direct association of the brand with the platform among end users. Eventually the users of the platform make up the asset more so than the code the platform is built on, and the platform organically finds itself competing with the brand of the content producing users, and starts to increasingly looks more like a traditional platform (like Twitter or Facebook) than like open source software. 

Mujeeb of Alpha Fork gave the inspiring story of how a newspaper organisation in Kerala ( Janayugom) completely switched their work flow to FOSS including pre press works and accountings. Building a Kubuntu based custom distro Janayugom GNU/ Linux as their main OS and Scribus for layouting purpose. Moving from proprietary software to Gimp, Inkscape, Krita, Libre office, etc for their other needs. The talk was about the journey of migration, the challenges and the results. Followed by this Rishabh Nambiar gave a lightning talk about discourse. He talked about the remote culture at Discourse, their plans. More interesting was how various organizations, teams and projects are using discourse to host discussions and conversations.

Licensing has ever been a hot topic in the FOSS world. Choosing the right software license was a talk delivered by Anivar Anand, Founder Executive Director of Indic Project. A portion of the talk focused on increasing understanding around free software license choices and discusses how that is important for your project's long term strategy. Later Anivar raised some important questions about openwashing, license changes while explaining why engineers should participate in this conversation more so than legal teams and lawyers.

The closing talk was an interesting one. Apar Gupta is the Executive Director of Internet Freedom Foundation. Apar drew our attention to the intersection of rule of law and the free software philosophy and its relevance today. The first part of this talk was centered around online campaigns and our learnings around them. Later building a case about freedom of the internet, he briefed about the challenges to build and sustain online collectives over a medium to long term that can impact change. 

After this talk was a round of open discussion where the audience gave feedback to the organizers. There was a conversation about women in tech, and steps the organizers could have taken to ensure more women participation. A few members of the audience offered to help in the next edition of IndiaOS as well.

Next Steps

Version 0.1 of IndiaOS made it clear that there is a despairing need for such an event and platform for FOSS and the onus is on IndiaOS team to take this forward. 

There are a whole bunch of ideas and projects that are going to be announced under this banner. As the first step, Zerodha and ERPNext Foundation have decided to grant Rs 1 lakh to the Biswas from Kerala Rescue Project for his leadership in the project, and also grant Rs 1 lakh to the Internet Freedom Foundation for their fantastic work to protect the internet and the fundamental rights it enables.

This is just the first stone in laying the foundation of what looks like a beautiful beginning of something great.

~ Shivam Mishra and Marica D’souza