It's Time to Become an 'Uploading Nation'

India has been a 'downloading nation' for many decades, though our IT services organisations have made the country proud. But the time is now ripe to turn into an 'uploading nation' by contributing to global open source software. This is what Prof. S. Sadagopan opined when he spoke at Open Source India last October. The founding director of the Bengaluru-based IIITB (he served the institute from 1999 to 2021) also outlined the work done by this great institute in the domain of open source.

- Shivangi Kharoo

After BSNL launched the consumer internet in 1995, everyone started downloading whatever they wanted — annual reports, course materials, the Vedas or cooking recipes. Downloading made lives much easier. Today, India is a nation of developers and we are coders for the world. But the question is: If we are a developer nation, why are we only downloading and not contributing to open source? Thankfully, while this was a bitter truth a decade ago, it is not so anymore! Today, open source has matured enough for countrywide growth and adoption across various sectors in India, and is making inroads into domains like education, healthcare, land and property management, and even drug discovery.

Open source does not need any kind of aggressive selling today, but there was a time when it was caught in the middle of religious wars in the tech world. Big companies like Microsoft were not very supportive of the open source movement. These attitudes are now a thing of the past, and open source is widely accepted today.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the concept of open source was almost mystical and challenging to us. Our PhD and master’s theses often included program listings as an appendix, showcasing the tradition we come from. (Program listing is the complete listing of a computer program, source code, and all files that make up the program.)