Did start-up boom in early 2000s kill India's open-source culture?
What's the story
Zerodha's Chief Technology Officer Kailash Nadh has said that India's early 2000s start-up boom stifled the country's open-source culture. He told Moneycontrol that developers who once worked on community-driven projects shifted to fast-growing companies, which did not prioritize giving back to the ecosystem. "In the early 2000s, India had very strong free software and open-source communities. That momentum fizzled out when the tech start-up wave exploded," Nadh said.
Corporate indifference
Criticism of big tech companies
Nadh also criticized big tech companies that have built multi-billion dollar valuations on open-source software but don't acknowledge it. He said, "Unless leadership creates an open-source culture, there will be no contributions." His comments were made in the context of FLOSS/fund, a $1 million open-source funding initiative launched by Zerodha last year.
Tech resilience
Open-source capability for national technology resilience
Nadh also emphasized the importance of open-source capability for national technology resilience. He said, "No country can build meaningful tech capacity without open source. You cannot invent the entire computational universe from scratch." He warned that dependence on a few foreign SaaS and cloud providers poses strategic risks, adding that "if access to global SaaS platforms is ever cut off, it becomes a systemic risk."
Global support
FLOSS/fund has completed its 1st year
The FLOSS/fund has completed its first year, and only about $200,000 has been disbursed so far due to cross-border paperwork and tax compliance requirements. The latest tranche, announced in October, funds projects like Blender, FFmpeg, KDE, Matrix, OpenStreetMap, Wireshark, F-Droid, Kiwix, and Zig. Nadh stressed that the fund is global and not limited to software used within Zerodha. "The open-source ecosystem is interconnected," he said.
Fund advocacy
Nadh calls for sovereign fund
Nadh suggested that India should consider establishing a sovereign fund with community participation to build foundational open-source infrastructure. He said, "You cannot pick global open-source infrastructure projects from inside a single company. You need ecosystem support."