IndiaOS conference 2020 had some of the best open-source inspirations

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Hey there,

On 18th Jan 2020, I got a chance to speak at the IndiaOS conference in Bangalore about Reshaper library.

The objective of the event was to set up interaction among the Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) community in India and to showcase different FOSS products. 

The event was organized by Frappe and Zerodha and was very well conducted. Here’s a short article about my experience interacting with the community and the learnings from the talk.😊

There were over a hundred participants at the conference. The community firmly believes in a future where the FOSS products can outgrow Enterprise commodities.

My favorite talk was from Biswas Babu who talked about creating the Kerala rescue website in 2019 during the flood in Kerala. He was a 3rd year engineering student when he created the website with the help of the IEEE community at his college. Later, the website became the official portal of Kerala Government for the rescue operations. The project saw contributions from all over the world within days and they managed to build a robust platform, which literally saved thousands of lives. In fact, this was a FOSS project which had an immediate impact on the community.🙏

Mujeeb Rahman told an amazing and funny story of Janayugam newspaper. They crossed a lot of hurdles to become the first Indian Newspaper to completely switch their workflow to open-source including pre-press works and accounting. They built a Kubuntu-based custom Janayugom Linux as their main OS.

Kailash Nath, CTO of Zerodha, told the story of how they became the No. 1 Stockbroker in India leveraging open-source technologies. FOSS has made it possible for a team of just over 20 developers to build a robust platform with over 1.5 million daily retail order volumes in India.

Pranav talked about building Chatwoot, an open-source customer support tool built on Vue.js and Rails. While it was inactive for one and a half years, a recent decision of making it open-source kicked the work around it. Later, the project received contributions from 30 developers across the world. They reached more than 3000 stars in Github and have recently turned down an acquisition offer!😉

The sessions came to an end with a talk from Apar Gupta, the Executive Director at Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF). He talked about the policy strategies IFF has adopted and how it engages with governance institutions given the present challenges.

The event was organized with the true spirit of open-source. I learned about the amazing open-source projects happening pan-India. I advise more participation in such events to understand the magic open-source platforms are creating. After all, we have one in the house.