Open source emerged as a global megatrend

Kamal Brar, Vice President and General Manager of APAC, Hortonworks

"India is home to a large number of developers, second only to the US, who not only use open source software (OSS) extensively but also contribute to their development back to the community. As the population of developers in India grows, so will OSS adoption. Today open source software is an emerging megatrend globally, positively impacting organizations large and small and Governments, start-ups and SMBs in India that prefer open source.

The Government of India (GOI) has committed to OSS adoption across all e-Governance systems rolled out by its various departments as a preference; as an alternative to proprietary software. In fact, the founding principles of IndiaStack is based on open source. OSS is significant to achieving the goals of GOI in fostering innovation, greater participation and transparency in delivery of online services to citizens under Digital India.

It frees up organizations from lock-in to propriety vendor software stacks, ensures better security (as one can inspect the source code) and fosters participation by developers to further improve various GOI apps. Besides being an innovator, GOI wants to ensure transparency and curb corruption across its functions by leveraging technology as seen with its Government eMarketplace (GEM) initiative.

It frees up organizations from lock-in to propriety vendor software stacks, ensures better security (as one can inspect the source code) and fosters participation by developers to further improve various GOI apps. Besides being an innovator, GOI wants to ensure transparency and curb corruption across its functions by leveraging technology as seen with its Government eMarketplace (GEM) initiative.

Across the world many governments are increasing their engagement on open source. This is critical to powering a culture of innovation that is vital to serve the needs of a modern world.  The use of technology, including open source software, is moving out of the sphere of simply 'acquiring a product' to 'investing in innovation'. The Government of India’s move has triggered a surge in interest and usage for OSS. Although it is difficult to put a number to it, this is an exciting opportunity for vendors of OSS and the community at large to ensure widespread adoption and a level playing field for all.

 The key concern is training and availability of talent that will drive the next wave of adoption. Though, large systems integrators in India have committed re-skilling of majority of their workforce on next generation open source, Cloud and Big Data technologies, there is a need for a platform to train and prepare individual developers on emerging OSS and their upgrades. At Hortonworks for example, we provide a set of easy to use Sandbox environments of fully loaded and tuned with tutorials. These are all available free to download from our website."