I am a keen user / propagater / advocator of OpenSource. Ever since I stumbled upon it by accident 3 years back, I have been drawing left, right and centre from this pool of ready to use software. Its capability for customization has been exploited by me for creating winning and highly loved solutions at amazing costs for my clients.

Five months back, when I commissioned myself to do an application from scratch, I was shocked. The urge to get back into opensource driven codebases was huge, and staying away caused withdrawal symptoms. That’s when I realized that I have unwittingly let myself walk away from the path of innovation and breaking tech, by pandering to my business needs and utilizing opensource to beat competition, and so on.

Opensource is easy to use, easy to customize, easy to find support for, and easy to maintain. Small wonder then that it has emerged as a “perfect” solutions for businesses here, who get FREE codebases to service their markets.

But in this process, and from the larger perspective of taking India to the front of the Intellect Ranges of the world, are we really moving?

I wonder how many of us here in India, really do path-breaking tech creations from ground up. In the recent past, most of the really high traffic pullers have not happened here. They have happened (with, in all probability, Indian teams) abroad. Talk twitter, tinyURL, etc. None oh none has happened here at all.

Are we, Indian developers, programmers, evangelists and so on, all about creating applications out of opensource? And that too, what apps ? We create a “Delhi” portal out of Drupal, and claim funding and top notch returns. We create a “Food Bloggers Community” outta, say, a MU-WP, and claim funds?

Duh !!!

I’d like to see a radical concept come from here. One that attracts and enthuses people across verticals, functions, walks of life, ages, genders and so on, use it … I for sure wouldn’t want to live in the “age of clones”, where I use localization or indigenization as a parameter for picking up a software and calling it “apt” (like the millions of YouTube clones, etc !!!)