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 !!!)

I firmly believe that everyone has a unique DNA strand of knowledge, as a combination of personal capability, education and experience.  And every person has this unique identifier, that I shall choose to call “peoplewire”.

I tried to find an expression for this strand in thelearningworld.com by creating a single-point repository of opensource education, where each person creates or participates in a training program to scale up efficiencies, capabilities, skills, and overall knowledge of all those who choose to partake of this training program.

I used moodle, my favourite opensource e-Learning software, to create this portal.

thelearningworld.com

Someday, I’ll start work on it again

Its not really fancy like Joomla or Mambo, and doesn’t even have a whole lot of whistles like these two things have, but I’ll still stick with Drupal.

Reason ? I fully believe that I can do an amazing job of creating anything from basic websites to mind-blowing portals to super integrated communities using Drupal. A huge amount of modules, community support and other things go a long way to making this the best CMS of all for me.

I power all my portals and most of my websites using Drupal. 2 mins to install, 10 mins to setup various modules and plugs, 3 hours to integrate them so that dumb error mesgs don’t happen, 3 hours to put up a nice custom theme,  and voila i’m done … I seriously think the world should use Drupal.

Go take a look at it… http://drupal.org…