Opensource India is a popular tech conference on open source technologies conducted by Open Source For You Magazine in collaboration with open source community and industry.
First Keynote session was given by Microsoft. It is unimaginable to think Microsoft giving a keynote session in an open source conference few years back. But company is making a serious effort to change that perception among the developer community. Speaker from Microsoft talked about how the company started adopting Open Source after Satya Nadella became CEO. They started with the tag line Microsoft Loves Linux to evangelize open source within the company. Microsoft open sourced many internal software like Dapr, OAM, Trill, etc. Recently Microsoft open sourced even its popular calculator application of windows. Above all it made a big acquisition of github which is the go to repository for open source software. It will be of no surprise if Microsoft open sources the source code of windows in future!!!
Aadhaar was a huge successful project for Indian government as it saved millions of dollars by plugging the leaks in the Public Distribution System. Many countries approached Indian government to help them in building digital identity systems like aadhaar for their countries. But aadhaar was more of a solution specific to India which cannot be used directly by other countries. This led to the idea of building an Open Source Platform called Modular Open Source Identity Platform(MOSIP) by IIIT Bangalore. This project was started in 2018 and is funded by Melinda and Gates Foundation, Sir Ratan Tata Trust and Omidyar Network. This platform is being used by two countries to build their National Identity Projects. The mandate given by these foundations to IIIT Bangalore was to build the platform and implement it for at least three countries by 2021. The first version of the source code is completely available in github and they are looking for developers to contribute to the project.
Next there was a panel discussion around the topic Growth of Open Source. According to panelists Open Source adoption matured in enterprises from cost saving approach to value proposition compared to proprietary software. IBM acquiring Redhat for 34 billion dollars is by far the largest acquisition ever in the software industry. Microsoft acquired github. These two acquisitions show how much enterprises value the open source software. Then the discussion went around how elite companies are looking for hiring candidates who contributed to opensource. One of the panelist talked about how his company which sells retail software to top retailers is built purely on top of open source software. One recommendation made to fresh college students was to participate in Google Summer of Code which is a paid internship opportunity to contribute to many open source software.
Lately there have been lot of foundations formed to build standards in different industries. There is OCF foundation for IOT, OpenSDS for storage and ONF for telecom industry. The objective of all these foundations is to define standards which helps in seamless interoperability between the vendors and also use opensource software to achieve the same. This is a very good trend which finally benefits the customers without any vendor lockin.
In another session by JFrog, the company which developed artifactory, the speaker talked about Singularity. Singularity is a time frame in future when machines will overtake man in intelligence. The prediction is that this will happen by 2040 which is not very far.
