Bharat Exhibitions is pleased to organize its flagship event 5th Edition of Open Source Virtual Summit 2022 on 17th February at 1030 - 1400 Hrs IST. The roadmap ahead for free and open source software in India is pretty well mapped. Just as we know, the Ministry of Electronics & IT (MeitY) in its formulation of Govtech 3.0 policies aims at harnessing the potential of social innovators to help solve India’s toughest problems. MeitY has already stated that open source adoption was necessary to support the government’s goal to transform India into a “Digitally Empowered Society and a Knowledge Economy”. The Ministry has taken many initiatives for promoting and fostering the adoption of Free & Open Source Software (FOSS) in view of various inherent advantages like increasing interoperability, developing local capacity/ industry, reducing costs, conserving foreign exchange, achieving vendor independence, enabling localization and reducing piracy/copyright infringements. Union minister for IT, Telecom and Railways, Ashwini Vaishnaw once quoted that Open Source Software is the key tool to achieve Digital Democracy within the country. Primarily the aim here is to make people connected to the government and its policies digitally. Some of the largest government projects namely, Aadhar, MyGoV, UPI, Aarogya Setu and many other technology start ups are based solely on Open Source software. All these have one thing in common, transparency, privacy and security and are in sync with India’s policy on Open Source Software.

India today is well positioned to become a vibrant hub for open source software primarily due to a large number of 4G users, 96% of whom use open source software for their operating systems, primarily Android. The Indian government spends significant amount of money per year on software licences and maintenance. The Government is adopting this technology as it offers a scalable and robust platform which in turn modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. About 50 countries, including Canada, Mexico, Nigeria and Panama, have shown interest in having a COWIN like system to run their vaccination drive. Adding to this, India is ready to share the open source software free of cost to these countries.

Indian industry/SMEs can benefit from the liberal licensing norms of FOSS which enables software to be freely modified and distributed. The Government of India has encouraged the adoption of this technology in the Digital India initiative. Open source should be viewed as a route to helping organizations boost software security. A progressive and integrated approach to security helps organizations make a cultural shift that increases transparency, makes problem solving easier and boosts collaboration. As well as protecting a business, it can rapidly increase the pace of innovation. The primary goal of employing open source in government is also to facilitate the transfer of data as smoothly as possible. Open-standards proponents say that this approach would lead to more innovation within government and better citizen services.