Startup boom in 2000s killed open-source momentum in India: Zerodha CTO Kailash Nadh

Kailash Nadh - CTO- Zerodha

Zerodha Chief Technology Officer Kailash Nadh said the early startup boom in India killed the country’s open-source culture, as developers who previously ran community-driven projects moved into fast-growing companies that did not prioritise contributing back to the ecosystem.

“In the early 2000s, India had very strong free software and open-source communities. That momentum fizzled out when the tech startup wave exploded,” Nadh told Moneycontrol.

“Large tech companies that built multi-billion dollar valuations on top of open source do not even acknowledge open source. Unless leadership creates an open-source culture, there will be no contributions.”

Nadh was speaking in the context of FLOSS/fund, the one-million-dollar open-source funding initiative launched by Zerodha last year.

Also read: No country can build tech capacity without open source, says Zerodha CTO Kailash Nadh

Call for a sovereign FOSS fund

Meanwhile, Nadh also said open-source capability is central to national technology resilience.

“No country can build meaningful tech capacity without open source. You cannot invent the entire computational universe from scratch,” he said. He added that reliance on a small number of foreign SaaS and cloud providers creates strategic risk.

“If access to global SaaS platforms is ever cut off, it becomes a systemic risk. Building local capacity is only possible if there is a healthy open-source ecosystem.”

He said India should consider setting up a sovereign FOSS fund, administered with community involvement, to support foundational open-source infrastructure.

FLOSS/fund completes first year with global focus

The fund has completed its first year and allocated the full amount across two tranches.

The most recent tranche announced in October includes funding for projects such as Blender, FFmpeg, KDE, Matrix, OpenStreetMap, Wireshark, F-Droid, Kiwix, and Zig. The projects span programming languages, developer libraries, digital mapping, secure communication, and internet infrastructure.

Nadh added that the fund is intentionally global and not restricted to software used inside Zerodha.

“The entire tech stack at Zerodha and pretty much every digital system in the world is built on open source. The open-source ecosystem is interconnected. It is important to fund the ecosystem in general,” he said.

Community participation drives selection

The fund does not use a traditional application form. Eligible projects are required to publish a public funding.json project detailing their financial requirements, which is reviewed openly.

Nadh said this approach encourages transparency and allows other organisations, not just Zerodha, to identify and support critical projects.

Project evaluation is done with support from the broader open-source community through FOSS United, the non-profit founded in 2020 to revive India’s open-source networks.

“You cannot pick global open-source infrastructure projects from inside a single company. You need ecosystem support,” Nadh said.

Disbursals delayed due to regulatory checks

Despite allocating one million dollars, only around $200,000 has been disbursed so far.

The remainder has been delayed due to cross-border paperwork and tax compliance requirements.

“Delays have been purely jurisdictional. Every country has its own norms. It is a paperwork and regulatory issue,” Nadh said.

To address this, the fund is working with GitHub Sponsors to route grants through GitHub’s global payment infrastructure.

The arrangement is currently awaiting approval from the Reserve Bank of India. “If that works out, disbursals will be much faster. We also hope to set precedent so the next entity does not have to go through the same regulatory hoops,” he said.

Corpus may be increased

The current $1 million annual corpus may be revised in the coming year.

“This was an experiment. Very few companies in the world run something like this. We are open to increasing the corpus,” Nadh said.