Infosys joins open source community to share intellectual property with cos

IT services firms are shifting towards digital platforms to increase demand for pay-as-you-use model

India's second largest IT service firm Infosys on Tuesday became a community member of Open Invention Network (OIN), joining global firms such as Google, IBM and Toyota to share intellectual property on Linux programmes developed between organisations. OIN is the largest open source software community with 2,000 members.

With more customers of Infosys in banking and other sectors across the different countries using open source to develop many consumer-focused applications, the company believes open source software is important.

The OIN allows Infosys to access the intellectual property from other companies through a sourced pool and without paying a royalty fee.

The Indian IT services firms are shifting their business towards digital technology services and platforms like open source owing to increasing demand from clients for pay-as-you-use model.

One of the US-based banks that outsources services to Indian firms like TCS, Cognizant recently said it is experimenting many customer applications on open source and DevOps platforms along with the mainframe eco-system. Open source also helped it save cost.

"Open source software has become the primary engine of innovation, and should now be viewed as the key building block of all modern enterprise architectures. Innovation in areas like cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence, DevOps and modern web frameworks are all happening in the open source ecosystem, and the adoption of these technologies in enterprises is benefiting from the foundation of Linux that enterprise IT departments have already invested in. Infosys is actively taking open source, and open source based products, to all our enterprise customers," said Navin Budhiraja, head of architecture & technology, Infosys.

"We are pleased to have a premier global IT services firm, like Infosys, join the OIN community," said Keith Bergelt, chief executive of OIN. "We believe that those that look to the company for inspiration, both in and outside of India, will see the wisdom it has demonstrated by supporting patent non-aggression in Linux and adjacent open source technologies."