The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization promoting open source adoption, has announced the launch of its India entity. The organization is looking to promote open source contributions across the South Asian nation’s ecosystem of enterprises, startups, and the government.
India already has 13.2 million developers using GitHub for their projects, per Microsoft. The country is also the second-largest market for open source developers after the U.S. and is expected to surpass the U.S. by 2028. However, contributions to open source projects from the Indian developer community are relatively limited: About 200,000 developers currently contribute to open source projects hosted by the Linux Foundation.
The nonprofit aims to bolster that number through its newly established India entity, LF India.
“India is becoming quite a big contributor and user of open source. So, we said let’s just set up LF India for local collaborations so that we can have a global impact,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager and SVP of the Linux Foundation and head of LF India, in an interview.
The Indian entity will work with local developers, enterprises, startups, and intergovernmental organizations in the country to incubate and support open source software projects.
India has a fair history of adopting open source software, as several local communities have been boosting its adoption for the last several years. The Indian government also embraces open source technologies to save costs and limit reliance on proprietary solutions. In 2021, the government announced a policy on adopting open source software to encourage its use among state-run organizations and departments.
Joshipura told TechCrunch that the Reserve Bank of India and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology are already using some of Linux Foundation’s projects through the LF Decentralized Trust for developments such as the ongoing pilots for Digital Rupee and National Blockchain Framework.
“What we are trying to do with LF India is develop the ecosystem further so that not just the government but enterprises and everybody is not just a consumer of open source but also a contributor and a leader in open source. That requires training, education, and lots of proof of concepts,” he said.
The LF India will work with local entities including open source networking firm OpenNets and nonprofit organization International Startup Foundation to provide training and support for open source deployments.
The Linux Foundation already has separate entities in Europe and Japan. The European entity, which was established in 2022, has already launched some open source projects focused on local use cases, such as OpenWallet Foundation to power interoperable digital wallets and Project Sylva for an open source telco cloud stack.
Joshipura said the India setup will develop projects that will directly be launched upstream into the Linux Foundation’s global entity — unlike its European counterpart, which develops region-specific projects due to regulatory restrictions.
Cloud-native, telecommunications, edge/IoT, blockchain, security, and domain-specific AI technologies are some of the segments that the Indian entity will look at. It will also help stimulate the ongoing tech collaborations between the U.S. government and its Indian counterpart and enable the standardization of open source de-facto for critical infrastructure, including telecom.
“Through our collaborative efforts with the likes of the Linux Foundation and LF India, we are harnessing the power of open source innovation to build a more secure, resilient, and trustworthy 6G ecosystem, ensuring the integrity of our communications and safeguarding national security for generations to come,” Tom Rondeau, principal director for FutureG for the U.S. Department of Defense, said in a prepared statement.
The local setup will host events to bring the Indian open source community closer and enable networking among open source contributors and developers. The Linux Foundation is currently hosting its first two-day event, KubeCon, in Delhi this week and is set to hold its second version in Hyderabad in August next year followed by its flagship open source software event Open Source Summit in the city. Additionally, the local entity will work toward expanding the Linux Foundation’s membership base in the country, which already has Infosys and Reliance Jio among its key members.
Sub-organizations of the Linux Foundation will also get more contributors through the Indian entity. The country is already the fourth-largest contributor to the Linux Foundation’s Cloud Native Computing Foundation and is the third-largest base for Kubernetes contributors.
“As open source continues on its global growth trajectory, we are time and again inspired by the rapid adoption of open technology in India, driven by policy and investment by government and organizations across the region,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director, Linux Foundation. “LF India is an important milestone in the Linux Foundation’s mission to expand global awareness of open source.”
