Indian firms are not open sourcing enough

Last year, GitHub announced that India emerged as the fastest-growing country in the world by open source contribution. The report also showed that the number of contributors increased by 80 per cent over the previous year (2020). 

However, the reality is quite the opposite. Though India boasts over 100+ unicorns, most of which were built using open-source tools and libraries, when it comes to contributing back to the community or even acknowledging the usage of these resources—it is rare to find a taker.

“I think this is a cultural problem,” says Kailash Nadh, CTO, Zerodha—one of the leading proponents of the Indian open source ecosystem, to Analytics India Magazine. He adds, “Of all the ‘unicorns’ and their success stories, there are barely any stories of engineering success or their engineering teams.”

Nadh emphasises the lack of prominent engineering voices from these companies. Majority of the decision-makers responsible for driving these companies tend to be business leaders and not engineering leaders with hands-on engineering involvement, he explains further. 

“If a company's sole focus is business and valuation growth, and engineering is treated merely as a tool for pushing those metrics, the likelihood that they will have an engineering or developer culture that cares about tech and FOSS [free and open-source software] contributions, is extremely low,” Nadh asserts. 

Experts believe that the culture of care must be instilled from the top down to encourage tech teams to care about FOSS and their contributions to it. 

There is a pressing need to establish work environments conducive to cultural and structural transformations in leadership.

“Without technical leaders in an organisation with decision-making powers driving this, it is very difficult to emerge spontaneously. Unfortunately, amongst Indian startups, it seems that business leaders completely overshadow engineering leaders and good engineering culture,” concurs Nadh.  

The ever-changing narrative  

Not everyone follows the industry template though. Recently, CRED open-sourced its UI framework, ‘NeoPOP.’ 

Besides CRED, ‘Thoughtworks’—one of the leading tech consultancy firms—promotes the FOSS culture and curates good projects. Some of the biggest FOSS contributions also come from FOSS promoters like ERPNext, Hopscotch, Chatwood, AppSmith and others.

In addition to these contributions, there are several one-off projects from various companies, although nothing noteworthy. 

Individual developers have taken the initiative to support despite no open encouragement or push for FOSS contributions from their employer organisations. 

“The top management is probably wholly unaware of these contributions,” Kailash Nadh speculates.

Promoting FOSS culture 

At this point, it would not be too unconventional to claim that FOSS contributions have the potential to widen the scope of innovation. 

Then, the question remains—How do start-ups go about this?

“For the number of tech ‘unicorns’ who tout their product success and scale, the number of companies who make meaningful FOSS contributions is absolutely abysmal,” contends Kailash Nadh, CTO at Zerodha. 

Nadh asserts that to create FOSS contributions out of day-to-day corporate work, it is essential to design and architect the software to incorporate certain philosophies and strategies enabling reuse. He believes that it is important to instil an ideology in the engineering space to consider the software through the lens of reusability—“This again requires a culture where the management actively encourages and drives FOSS contributions and participation.” 

Conversely, Ketan Jogani, Lead–Mobile Tech at CRED, says that every engineering team is at a different stage and has a unique approach to engaging with the community. 

“We believe open sourcing is important to support developer innovation and grow the ecosystem. However, it involves a considerable amount of time and resources to build and roll out open-source frameworks—and we see this taking shape in India as well,” says Jogani in reference to the GitHub report—which claims that the GitHub India community has the third-largest number of active developers on GitHub. 

In 2021, GitHub collaborated with a few leading venture partners in India to push open contributions. Additionally, it ran a pilot programme to provide access to GitHub Enterprise for Indian startups. GitHub claims outstanding engagement was observed on its end from these startups—nearly 200 startups signing up, including Kawa Space, AirMeet, ClearQuote and others. 

In yet another initiative, GitHub launched the GitHub Accelerate programme to support startups' technological growth by providing access to its enterprise products. The programme is open to startups who are part of a select partner network of accelerators, incubators and venture funds. 

Fear of exploitation, really? 

But does open-sourcing pose any notable challenges to companies? Our research offers interesting insights.

Recently, a Bengaluru software engineer hacked the IndiGo airlines' website to retrieve his lost luggage. He took advantage of a technical vulnerability in the airlines’ website to fetch details of a co-passenger. 

In another instance, a product security engineer revealed a simple trick to get free Uber rides anywhere in the world. 

But is it really as easy as it seems?

AIM interviewed developers from various startups who expressed concerns about potential exploitation of their products and vulnerability to hacking attempts while open sourcing their projects. 

“I think the fears are unfounded,” says Nadh while explaining that, much like everything else, only a small percentage of released FOSS projects ever get any traction—“GitHub has millions of dead FOSS projects with no adoption, and only a tiny fraction of projects are active.” 

He further explains that producing software that others are able to adopt and contribute to is a more significant challenge than battling ‘exploitation.’ 

“In fact, even the word ‘exploitation’ here is problematic,” he adds. 

FOSS, by definition, allows others to use softwares as they may please—as long as those freedoms are not exclusionary. Discussing at length, Nadh speaks about how the freedom of usage is not ‘exploitation’ unless in reference to megacorps that actively extract value from FOSS labour and refuse to contribute in return. 

“Only a tiny fraction of FOSS projects ever get meaningful adoption, let alone get to a level where they would be ‘exploited’ by megacorps.”

— Kailash Nadh, CTO at Zerodha

In coda, Nadh emphasises that if we go by the same logic, a company that uses numerous FOSS components to build their products but refuses to contribute in return for a fear of ‘exploitation’, ironically, is exploiting FOSS. 

“Sounds hypocritical,” quips Nadh. 

Wake up 

How can such concerns be best addressed?

Experts claim that to bring about any significant change, a culture of contribution and sharing has to be actively instilled in engineering spaces. This requires dynamic involvement from top management and key decision-makers who understand and care about FOSS and engineering, and discourage its treatment as merely a means of boosting business and valuations. 

“The overarching theme here is that in Indian companies, there is a lack of hands-on, technically sound decision-makers who care about engineering culture and FOSS... After spending a decade in the industry, I am convinced that this is the root cause of the abysmal FOSS culture in the Indian corporate world. Even in tech companies, business leaders completely overshadow and overrun engineering leaders.This is the case even in young startups. It is sad.”

—Kailash Nadh, CTO at Zerodha 

Simply put, the Indian developer ecosystem seems tilted towards a consumerist ideology with little to no focus on contribution. 

GitHub reports demonstrate that the number of contributions on the platform, such as issues and team discussions, saw an increase of 75 per cent in India compared to about 40 per cent in the rest of the world over last year. 

(Source: GitHub)

“The number of Indian developers contributing to open source projects is on the rise, and it is our hope that the community will eventually come together to create multiple opportunities to have developers collaborate and contribute to projects,” concludes Ketan Jogani on an optimistic note.