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 the 1990s 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.

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