Free software in India

The history of Free Software in India can be seen from three different perspectives - the growth of Free Software usage, the growth of Free Software communities, the adoption of Free Software policies by the governments. India was quite late to the free software scene with adoption and penetration growing towards the end of 1990's with the formation of pockets of Free Software communities spread across the country. The communities were typically centered around educational institutions or free software supporting organizations.

Communities primarily revolved around support mailing lists. Some of the largest and earliest communities were those based out of Chennai,Delhi, Kochi, Mumbai, Pune, and Trivandrum.Free Software Foundation of India, was formed in 2001 to promote the use and development of free software in India.

Some of the state governments, notably Kerala and Tamil Nadu created policies on the use of Free Software in state level organizations and launched ambitions projects like IT@School, Elcot OpenSuse migration. The government of India rolled out a policy to adopt Open standards and promote open source and open technologies in 2015.

Free Software was almost synonymous with GNU/Linux and associated software in the past. However, with the gaining popularity of Free Software applications like Firefox or operating systems like Android it has become quite difficult to quantify the user base for Free Software. If we look at the usage of GNU/Linux operating systems in desktop computers in India we can see that the market share has increased to 1.8% in July 2016. A report of similar data in 2011 had shown that India was one of the top 20 users of GNU/Linux desktops globally.

In 2012, the government of India released 'National Information Technology Policy 2012', where one of the stated objectives was "to adopt Open standards and promote open source and open technologies". In continuation to this, the 'Policy on Adoption of Open Source Software for Government of India' was released in 2014. This policy states that

Government of India shall endeavour to adopt Open Source Software in all e-Governance systems implemented by various Government organizations, as a preferred option in comparison to Closed Source Software (CSS). The Open Source Software shall have the following characteristics:

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