What’s all the FOSS about?
There is something special about Free & Open Source Software (FOSS).
It has always been a vanguard, a revolutionary. And like most revolutionaries, it has been ahead of its time and the world took some time to warm up to it. Even more dangerously, it was an idea. A disruptive idea that asks us to collectively imagine a world where all information is free. Where cooperation and freedom go hand in hand.
Now however, FOSS has been the basis for most of the information technologies we rely on. It has come a long way since its inception in the early 70’s at the MIT-AI lab. En-route, it has threatened large multinational corporations, prevailed, and more recently led to its adoption within these same corporations. Its success is inherent in its ideals of freedom, cooperation, and distribution. Innovation and invention could occur much more rapidly with these ideals.
FOSS is now used everywhere; in space mission planning, inside fighter jets, within USB drives, helping detect gravitational waves, helping decide what you should watch next on the multitude of streaming applications, and it makes up the backbone for almost all parts of the internet. It has been used everywhere from responding to natural disasters, to creating and overthrowing governments and more unprecedentedly getting large multinational companies to understand the value of transparency and cooperate with one another.
India adopted FOSS during its awkward adolescence. Many user groups and individuals saw the weight it would carry in bringing equitable access to information, to utilize knowledge, and power and minimize the ever widening privilege gap in India and since then FOSS has had its own interesting journey of acceptance and use in the country.
Over the last five months we, at CivicDataLab, have had long discussions with various individuals in the FOSS ecosystem in India documenting oral and written histories. These conversations have culminated in the report titled “The State of the Free and Open Source Ecosystem in India” which we will be releasing in January 2021. In this report, we chronicle the evolution of FOSS in India, identify some key actors within the ecosystem and list out some challenges and recommendations.
We live in increasingly chaotic times. Our ability to successfully contain Covid-19 (and future pandemics) will largely be measured by our ability to cooperate as a species. This will also be true for all the global problems we will face in the near future: climate change, the upcoming global refugee crisis etc. The ephemeral, collective imaginary boundaries we have placed so far on ourselves will be useless for 21st century problems and FOSS is a powerful tool to disrupt these boundaries. For it to be harnessed responsibly and effectively, we need to understand its history and challenges.
The FOSS ecosystem in India is a complex forest and describing it is a potentially infinite task but we hope we have taken the first step toward understanding and documenting it. Along with the release of the report, we have a whole week of discussions planned around key focus areas and we encourage everyone who has any interest in this topic to attend these panels and join the conversation.
The link to register is here!
Please feel free to write to us at: foss@civicdatalab.in.
What’s all the FOSS about? was originally published in CivicDataLab on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.