Dear all,
I am working on an article to map the FOSS landscape in India. I spent some time going through archives of the various groups / Wikipedia pages and websites. What I see is a fragmented group of individual enthusiasts and contributors, either working individually or in companies that support / use FOSS and of course having a lot of flame wars. The Linux Archives India have a tag line "All The Dirty Laundry Unfit to Wash in Public"
From what I gather, the PC magazines of the mid-90s were critical in getting FOSS (via Linux) in India and there were a few mailing lists that cropped up in the late 90s (the earliest archives I found are from 98. This list itself was formed in 2001). I guess there were some fights about naming (who owns ILUG v/s Bharat LUG etc) and the mailing lists were mostly about sharing tips regarding installation, drivers and networking troubleshooting.
In Chennai CDAC was established in 1998 and they started promoting FOSS in local universities and then branched off into NRCFOSS and launched the Bharat Operating System (BOSS) in 2007 (anyone using it??) that had built in localisation for Indian Languages. These days NRCFOSS is supposed to be working on a “SAAS based delivery stack for cloud computing” but can’t find any evidence of it. (Your tax payer money!!)
In Bangalore, the community was driven by the very inspirational Atul Chitnis and Kenneth Gonsalves who got some “movement” going on with the FOSS.IN events (from 2001 to 2004) which I have heard (second hand) that were instrumental in introducing FOSS to a large number of people. I also heard they had an ugly spat. Bangalore is also home to VTiger CRM, a popular Open Source project (or is it Chennai? I heard it was run by the Zoho group, can anyone confirm?)
State of Kerala (where A is for Activism) has been on the forefront of FOSS implementation (atleast in the PR) and the state legislature has also moved to get FOSS implemented in government. As per Wikipedia FSF India was established in Kerala in 2001 and the movement is largely led by Satish Babu who is the director of ICFOSS. They seem to be the most progressive in terms of FOSS implementation and there are a lot of News Items on how they have successfully used FOSS in many Gov activities (power to them!). (Interestingly the ICFOSS website has a “Director” menu link instead of “About Us” as if the Director and the organization are the same thing!). Kerala is also the home to the formerly open source Fedena school ERP project, which is un updated in a while and and I think its not open anymore.
In Mumbai we have Nagarjuna from Homi Bhabha who runs the Gnowledge Lab from 2007 (still can’t figure how its different from a wiki!) and has also been active in promoting One Laptop Per Child and other FOSS projects in India. Also in Mumbai is the very inspirational Krishnakant Mane who runs the GNU Khata project in IIT Mumbai (funded by ICFOSS?). Did not find any post on the history of GNU Khata but the mailing list is since 2009, so I assume it has been around since 2006-7? Ironically Mumbai is the only city that has some “projects” (in Mumbai, we do, we don’t talk) including our ERPNext (sorry for the plug) which was started in 2006 but the repo is from around 2008.
Speaking of Projects, the NRCFOSS website has a number of projects listed, but like spent tax payer money it seems to be hard to find any public repository or mailing list for any of them.
Also sometime, I am guessing since Facebook and mobile explosion (2007), the focus has moved from Linux to a more broader (and some might say evil) “Open Source” - note the renaming of popular blogs and events (Linux Asia is now Open Source India, Linuxforu is now Opensourceforu) and focus has now “shifted” to cloud based technologies like “OpenShift” and also there has been some movement in the Android space (Aakash tablet, again anyone seen the repos?). Also the “free thinking” community has also moved to other technologies like Python which have a reasonable community and some traction in the universities (SciPy).
I am not covering the commercial space yet. The Open Source India (OSI Days) event is happening this weekend in Bangalore and I am not sure if they even bother to post on these lists. Wipro has pledged to staff its Open Source Unit to 10,000 (yay!). And not to mention the hundreds or may be thousands of Open Source development shops that have sprung up all over India (esp in Delhi, Jaipur, Ahmedabad) servicing Open Source projects on Elance and similar and mostly doing HTML / CSS / PHP based customization. The poor guys who don’t get respect for their taste but still manage serve many small businesses and keep the world moving.
In terms of contributors, I see some really brilliant individual contributors to various projects, many of whom have now moved to the west but their names still crop up in mailing list archives. There is a FOSS Community of India page on the wikia site that has a “hall of fame” section which is sadly unmaintained but has a list of many individual contributors (and probably some of them are spammed or self-promoted)
I guess this mail itself has become the article - I am sure I have missed a whole bunch of important stuff so please send your comments and thoughts. (specially the old timers!)
Thanks!
best, Rushabh
@rushabh_mehta https://erpnext.com