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 contribution is low. I have often wondered why has not a single Indian OSS product featured in the top 50 global lists. Why India has not given an OSS product, foundation or a community like the LINUX, Apache, Mozilla or Hadoop. Why has no Indian voluntary OSS community ever achieved critical mass? Why even there are no OSS services companies of the likes of Cloudera or Hortonworks from the mecca of IT services companies?
There were many other questions and I am sure you the reader also have some questions, assumptions and answers to share. So I talked to few leading OSS lights around besides doing a quick research at LinkedIn. I am sharing some insights and findings in this post with more to follow in the next post soon. I might be way off the mark here, so please have patience and share your views.
Some market stats
Global OSS acceptance by end-users has grown at a healthy pace. Blackduck’s 2015 Future of Open Source survey reports 78% of the respondents’ companies ran operations partly or completely on open source. As per the report, in 2-3 years, 88% of the companies are expected to increase their OSS contribution.
RedHat (Linux) has been the lone poster boy of OSS industry for a long time. Today it has revenues touching USD 2 billion and a market valuation of USD 14.5 billion. OSS has gained VC interest as reflected in growing VC funding in OSS space and rising valuations of OSS companies. Tracing back fifteen years, gross VC funding in OSS companies works out to roughly USD 7.5 billion; averaging USD 750 million annually in recent years. Recent OSS successes include (figures are revenues / valuation / funding raised) –
Cloudera (Hadoop): $200M / $5B / $100 M
MongoDB: N.A. / $1.6B / $311M
Hortonworks: $60M / $1.1B / N.A.
Global market size of OSS based products is estimated at about USD 50 billion. Though it seems improbable OSS market will any time soon reach the size of proprietary software (USD 50 billion vs. USD 320 billion in 2015), its double-digit growth rate (compared to 3%-5% for proprietary software) presents an attractive opportunity to tap into.
What does it all means for India and Indian OSS companies?
India and OSS
Gartner estimates that by 2017, about 90 per cent of Indian IT organizations will have open source software (OSS) embedded in their mission critical platforms. The user companies hope to lower TCO and increase ROI with OSS use. The industries with significant OSS adoption include education, banking, financial services and insurance and government. Education is the leader here – majority of public and private educational institutions using OSS for library automation, and several research organizations applying it to drug discovery space. Indian small or mid-size businesses use OSS as client facing service portals. The large IT companies such as Wipro, Infosys and Tech Mahindra are already using OSS to test software for clients.
The majority of Indian government offices are directing new initiatives that involve use of open-source software and solutions. Some of the prominent government initiatives include NRCFOSS (by DEITy), FOSSEE (at IIT Mumbai), BOSS (at CDAC) and whole lot of state government initiatives.
OSS contributors – Indian companies
As anywhere in the world, OSS engagement in India happens in two ways – (Paid) Employees at software product and services companies and IT employees in plethora of other businesses contribute OSS code either as their own product or to existing OSS projects like Linux, Hadoop etc. I am not including OSS contributions from the likes of IBMs in this study.
A lot of this contribution happens on repositories and forges like GitHub and Source Forge. It is heartening to note that registered users and projects from India on these destinations are steadily growing. For example InMobi contributed OSS code to Hadoop project and Flipkart has opened source of few of its projects including a more popular project phantom. In last couple of years, largest Indian OSS contributions (though tiny by global standards) came from ShepHertz, Hasgeek, Practo and Freshdesk. Code for India is another large volunteer based tech community that develops OSS solutions for Elections, City Governance, Women Safety, Education etc.
Overall, contribution from India is tiny compared to the top contributors across the globe and does not generate healthy interest from OSS communities around the globe. For example, the most popular Indian origin repository on GitHub has 232 stars placing it at rank 5376 on a list of 219,071 JavaScript projects.
Is it a good achievement? Can it be bettered? If yes how?
OSS – individual contributors
Then, a lot of individuals contribute to OSS project outside of their day-jobs. This is unpaid voluntary contribution driven by individual passion. Some leading lights in this category include – Hackerearth developer Sayan Chowdhury who is on Mozilla’s roster for contributions to Mozilla Kuma and Rust projects, Eucalyptus Systems’ Kushal Das who was nominated to Director of Python Software Foundation, Anand Chithipotu with big contribution to web.py, and Siddhesh Payarekar (Glibe). More recently, two developers getting into limelight are – Prakhar Shrivastav (102 repositories on Github with some having 1000 – 12000 stars), Karan Goel (113 repositories on Github with several having 500 – 8000 stars).
FOSS activities in India
FOSS related activities are mushrooming in India. For example, there are more than 150 Linux User Groups. Annual FOSS events on campuses and outside like OSI Days are growing. There is greater Indian participation in global FOSS events like Google Summer of Code, Code Jam, etc.
What drives low OSS contribution from India?
I asked a few OSS contributors around, Range of answers I got fell into three buckets – individual behaviors, employer policy and process, ecosystem issues.
Individual behaviors: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs seems to at play here. The respondents were unequivocal that Indian programmers write code for a living not for passion. “We focus on daily work and do not enjoy programming as a hobby.” Other factors that came out were – fear of being judged and ridiculed, poor communication skills resulting in lack of confidence and plain ignorance of OSS – What is Open Source? Can I even contribute? What are the legal issues?
Employer policy and processes: Other set of issues related to the employers. I found that programmers were motivated to contribute but the employer either did not encourage OSS contributions or were just confused about OSS policy and process. One respondent told us – “We would like to promote OSS contribution but we are hindered by the lack of a sophisticated OSS policy (as community participation requires a set of standard guidelines throughout the company).”
Another respondent told us – “We do it more on an adhoc basis and usually during low activity periods (which are rare).” An OSS evangelist reported – “I think developers are enthusiastic about it but the companies and managers do not focus on it. If they give enough time for developers to do OSS (initially it needs extra efforts and time but slowly developing like that becomes a habit), it should improve. “
Finally, it appears that IT services companies do not encourage open source contributions and elsewhere there was focus on exploiting OSS code rather than contributing back.
Ecosystem issues
The third major bucket of issues can be aptly labelled eco-system issues. These include educational and legal.
A common feedback across respondents was – “If India, like developed economies, too has strong IP Law and enforcement, we would see many software producers and consumers shift to OSS paradigm.” A feeling prevalent was that others consume OSS without giving credit and the law either does not protect of the legal process is lengthy and expensive.
Another important feedback was – lack of awareness of OSS licenses led to indecisiveness about OSS contribution even when the intention was all there.
A comment on the Government of India’s OSS policy said – “the policy is great but implementation leaves lot to be desired.”
Folks, I ask you if these issues sync with you. Please write back to take this conversation forward.
