Key takeaways
- Open source projects foster collaboration, transparency, and community development, aligning with the principles of Digital India.
- The National Policy on Information Technology emphasises the adoption of open standards and promotion of open source technologies.
- GitHub showcases India's contributions to open source through its 'Made in India' collection, highlighting emerging projects.
- One notable project, The Algorithms, documents algorithms in various programming languages and promotes collaborative problem-solving.
- The open-source community benefits from shared knowledge and resources, enhancing the overall development landscape in India.
Open source projects are publicly available and accessible, promoting collaborative participation, rapid prototyping, transparency, meritocracy, and community-oriented development. The philosophy behind the concept of an open-source ecosystem is the essential respect for a user’s freedom. It is an increasingly important aspect of Digital India. The National Policy on Information Technology 2012 of India has added to its objectives the imperative “Adoption of open standards and promotion of open source and open technologies".
GitHub, the software developer that houses open source projects, has a collection called “Made in India” to highlight the significant contribution of Indians on the platform. In this regard, the article mentions the five emerging open source projects from India in 2021.
The Algorithms
The Algorithms is an Indian project that documents and models helpful and interesting algorithms using code. The open-source community can cross-check and verify the contributions of others and collaborate to solve problems. The MIT-licensed project implements algorithms in Python, Java, Javascript, C, Go, C++, and other high-level programming languages. Furthermore, the project involves repositories that explain popular algorithms in simple languages with examples and links to their implementation in various programming languages. These algorithm explainer repositories are available in English, French, Hebrew, Indonesian, Korean, Nepali, and Spanish.
DIVOC
Digital Infrastructure for Vaccination Open Credentialing (DIVOC) is a project by Egov Foundation that aims to create an open-source digital platform for large scale vaccination and digital credentialing programs. Built for an Indian scale, the software is flexible and extendable and can be used across multiple health programmes. The MIT-licensed project was created in India to help digitally orchestrate large scale vaccination and certification using open-source digital public goods that are standards-driven, scalable, and secure. The architecture principles of the projects are:
- Microservices and API based
- Interoperable
- Scalable
- Flexible and Configurable
- Observable
- Resilient
- Privacy and Security by design
- Open Standards
- Trustable
- Internationalizable
indicTrans
indicTrans is a Transformer 4x multi-lingual model trained on the Samanantar dataset, which is the largest publicly available parallel corpora collection for Indic languages at the time of writing. The open-sourced project has its repositories available on GitHub. It is a single script model, where all the Indic data is converted to the Devanagari script, which allows for better lexical sharing between languages for transfer learning, prevents fragmentation of the subword vocabulary between Indic languages and allows using a smaller subword vocabulary. There are currently two models - Indic to English and English to Indic, supporting the following 11 Indic languages.
Hoppscotch
Hoppscotch is an open-source, lightweight request builder and API testing tool used by over 150,000 developers globally. It was built from the ground up with ease of use and accessibility, providing all the functionality needed for API developers with minimalist, unobtrusive UI. It has surged in popularity in just a short period and has become widely adopted by the developer community. Hoppscotch is built with HTML, CSS, SCSS, Windi CSS, JavaScript, TypeScript, Vue, and Nuxt. It can also be installed as a PWA on the device or used on real-time platforms like Test, Websocket, Socket.io, MQTT, and SSE connections.
Additionally, the API is customisable, and one can choose their combinations for background, foreground and accent colours. Finally, developers can contribute to the API via GitHub Flow. The MIT Licensed project has over 34.4k stars on GitHub and 2.4k forks.
Appsmith
Appsmith is a low code project that builds custom business software like admin panels, internal tools, and dashboards. One can use any of the 35+ pre-built UI widgets that connect to any database, GraphQL or REST API. The open-source framework is a toolkit that allows users to build UI visually with pre-made widgets on the canvas to create dashboards, workflows, and admin panels. Everything in Appsmith is a JavaScript object. Developers can contribute and validate their contributions on GitHub. The company is preferred by leading developers in India - AWS, WazirX, Swiggy, IBM, etc.
