Explained: How open-source software is powering India's startup ecosystem

Kailash Nadh, chief technology officer at Zerodha, one of India’s fastest-growing trading platforms, believes that the company would not have been what it is today if it wasn’t not for free and open-source software (FOSS). Without FOSS, the company could not have scaled up in terms of business, offerings and customers.

FOSS is a type of software in which the source code is released under a licence and the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute it to anyone and for any purpose. 

Zerodha’s Nadh chose open-source software because he had been using it since he was 14 years old to do coding and build projects. “For us at Zerodha, open source was a great choice, as we could pick up great technologies freely and build our software with very little cost.”

For instance, when Zerodha first launched its trading platform, Kite, in 2015, it was created for web users. A few months later, it launched an app version and then, as users began to grow, it offered the platform on iOS. In other words, the tech team at Zerodha was maintaining two different codes.

In 2018, Google released Flutter, an open-source mobile UI (user interface) software development kit. Within three months, Zerodha scrapped its older apps and started using Flutter. And they did it without any downtime or technical glitches. 

Similarly, Zerodha’s mutual fund platform, Coin, went through several iterations. The company was using Python, an open-source programming language to build the backend. But it realised that the system was not able to handle large volumes of transactions. So it moved to GO, another open-source programming language, and quickly achieved 50 times the capacity.

“Now, imagine these iterations and at a speed that matches my user-base growth. If I was working with a vendor, I would have spent more time getting my requirements communicated to them while paying an exorbitant licence fee,” says Nadh.

Zerodha’s story is replicated in the entire startup ecosystem of India. One of the reasons for the massive surge in the number of startups in the country is the accessibility of open-source software.

Bolo Indya, a short-form video app similar to Tik Tok, took to open source to achieve agility and cost-effectiveness at scale when it launched features like Bolo Live and Bolo Meets. “The ability to ship fast bug-less, even with limited resources, provides you a definite competitive edge,” says Neha Dixit, vice-president, engineering, at Bolo Indya.

Using open-source software gives startups the access to a powerful community and better tools. As Aankit Roy, co-founder and chief technology officer, Khabri — an audio-based startup — points out, “If anyone has to use the search feature on a product, and build the search technology, it will take engineering efforts and months to deploy the basic version and then iteration will be required to deliver the optimum result, which will take more time.”

He goes on to add: “Instead, if an open-source search engine like Elasticsearch or Solr is used, the feature can be deployed within a few weeks and with multiple options.”

With open-source software and cloud infrastructure, startups can also build competitive alternatives with high-quality standard technologies available to everyone, adds Roy.

The other big reason to use open source is agility. For startups to make a dent in the market or to be able to bring products faster to customers, they need to be quick with their responses. “FOSS gives us hundreds of options. We can chose great technologies and customise them the way we want. For a business to succeed in this fast-paced startup world, you need to own the technology stack,” says Nadh. “In our case, our systems had to grow as the users did. In order to scale, we were able to freely swap open-source components, without being tied to a vendor to whom you had to go back every time we needed to increase capacity.” 

Challenges

Despite the way open-source software nurtures the startup system, there are very few players, especially unicorns and soonicorns (or, startups that have the potential to enter the unicorn club), who come out and talk about the platform. One of the philosophies of open source is that users should give back to the community. This could be either by opening up their APIs (application programming interface) for other developers or by funding the community.

A recent report by Omidyar Network and CivicData Labs says that though India has the largest base of developers in the world, their contribution to the global pool of source code has been minuscule.

For those who do not know the power of open-source software, here are a few interesting facts. Over 85 per cent of India’s internet runs on FOSS, which we consume daily to browse via Google, chat over WhatsApp, book train tickets on the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation website, perform bank transactions at the State Bank of India, or watch a show on Netflix.

Open source: Some facts

A key reason for the surge in the number of startups in India is the accessibility of open-source software, which equips them with better tools and enables them to improve speed to market.

• India now ranks third in the world in terms of use of free and open-source software (FOSS), with 85 per cent of internet usage in the country running on it
• All academic development tools are FOSS but there is still a need to formalise a curriculum
• The technology business (IT and IT enabled services) in India still remains agnostic about choosing to keep their code open source or not
• India does have a FOSS policy, but it has major gaps in practice.

Source: The state of free and open source software in India Report by CivicData Labs and Omidyar Network