Supporting open source users seems like a thankless job. There have been many blogs written on this topic. Developers have stopped maintain popular projects because of the burn this causes. People who use open source projects, indirectly assume that they are entitled to free support, even if they have taken no effort to understand the issue, or tried searching for a solution. Image by...
A no-nonsense, free & opensource task & productivity management tool for growing startups fluxday was developed by Foradian starting in 2013 and was a critical part of Foradian’s hyper growth and success as a B2B software startup in EdTech space. With a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 323 per cent Foradian was listed in Deloitte Tech Fast50 India consecutively for two years. We...
I am surprised not to find a single Indian govt software being open sourced. This is despite the fact that most of them have horrible user experience and highly buggy. In all probability the code behind it would be equally poor. The govt. continues to spend crores of tax payers money to IT service providers to develop these abysmal portals instead of open sourcing it. Examples of some portals...
Open source software has been a constant buzz among few of the iSPIRT volunteers over last few months. How does India rate on OSS contribution? Does OSS seriously matter in the success of a software / software services business? Is it important enough to build an OSS ecosystem for the India based startups? My own perception has been that the OSS engagement in India is low and as a result the...
“Imagine if Mathematics was owned by corporates and every time you wanted to use it you had to buy some from a corporate!” started Eben Moglan, Founder of Software Freedom Law Centre at the Open Innovation and our Digital Future Lecture series organised by iSPIRT. It was definitely a thought provoking preview of the work that is taking place in India in the space of Free Open Source Software with...
Open Innovation has lead to the creation of priceless resources like Wikipedia, and Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) that form the foundations of our digital society. The freedoms enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of young people around the world, hacking on laptops, hacking on servers, hacking on general purpose hardware is the primary source of the innovation which drove much of the...
iSPIRT organized a OEQ(Open Ecosystem Hangout) on 20th April, 2015, to understand the role of software patents within the software ecosystem.Software patents are a much debated subject in the technology world today. In some jurisdictions like India, software is not part of patentable subject matter, while in other jurisdictions like the US, software patents are rampant. Do Indian startups need...
At the forefront of progress is change. iSPIRT continues to drive the process of change to Transform India as a Product Nation, using the engines of private initiative, policy and programs like Playbook Round Table and PNCamp. iSPIRT’s policy initiatives involve active dialogue with Government. Conclave for India as the Product Nation As part of this initiative, iSPIRT is hosting the...
Open Source has been quietly making its mark. Kickstarter just completed a billion dollars in crowdfunding. A lot of the work funded via Kickstarter is licensed for public use. Because the initial capital is pitched in by lots of people, the creators have a lot of incentive to give it back to the people. The Do-It-Yourself community in both software and hardware is also on the rise. This is an...
