Game changer: Making sense of open source software in digital economy

Earlier government projects used open-source technology, but the codes were never opened up to the larger community, reports Neha Alawadhi

Earlier this month, the government said India would allow its digital platform for the Covid-19 vaccination drive, CoWIN, to be open source for all countries to access, adapt and use, thereby becoming one of many countries that have open-sourced their government projects. 

Open-sourcing a software means that people can look at the code and suggest improvements or issues, and also use the code under a licence to develop similar products. India has had an open-source policy since 2015.

The source code of any government application, according to the policy, will be available for the community/adopter/end-user to study and modify the software and to redistribute copies of either the original or modified software, and would be “free from royalty”.

This is at the heart of any open-source project — openness and collaboration. 

What is open source?

Red Hat, the world’s leading open-source software solutions company, explains open source as “a term that originally referred to open source software (OSS). Open source software is code that is designed to be publicly accessible — anyone can see, modify, and distribute the code as they see fit. Open source software is developed in a decentralised and collaborative way, relying on peer review and community production. Open source software is often cheaper, more flexible, and has more longevity than its proprietary peers because it is developed by communities rather than a single author or company.” 

A study in 2015 said that the use of free and open-source software (FOSS) could lead to estimated savings of about Rs 8,254 crore in Indian schools, and about Rs 51.20 crore in police departments in the country.

Led by Rahul De of the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, the study, titled Economic Impact of Free and Open Source Software Usage in Government, looked at two departments — education and police — across seven states between October 2013 and April 2014. It found conclusive proof that the use of open-source software leads to huge cost savings and also promotes a do-it-yourself attitude towards technology among officials.

Open source and government

The use of OSS in government is not new. In 2009, the French Police said that it had saved millions of dollars by migrating its desktop software infrastructure away from Microsoft Windows and replacing it with the Ubuntu Linux distribution, an open-source operating system. 

The United States, in 2016, introduced the Federal Source Code Policy, whose main requirement was that any new custom source code developed “by or for the Federal Government” has to be made available for sharing and re-use by all federal agencies. 

More recently, as the Covid-19 pandemic spread last year, the government of Singapore was the first to open-source its Bluetooth contact tracing app, TraceTogether, as a generic codebase called OpenTrace in April 2020. It also published the BlueTrace protocol, on which both OpenTrace and TraceTogether have been built.

Explaining the working of TraceTogether, Jason Bay, the product lead of the app, wrote in a blog in April last year: “We use TraceTogether to supplement contact tracing — not replace it. One thing that sets TraceTogether apart from most private efforts to build a Bluetooth contact tracer is that we have been working closely with the public health authorities from Day 1.”

Closer home, the 2015 study looked at work done in Karnataka, Kerala, Goa, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Assam and Jharkhand, where the departments studied had either considered or were actively using FOSS.

Many of India’s large projects, including Aadhaar, the Goods and Services Tax Network, and Unified Payment Interface, have all used open-source technology to build the projects in question, but the code has never been opened for the larger community to examine.

“We have a very good e-governance policy for making sure we use open source and publish more. One challenge in open source in government projects is...the right capacity, and right understanding of what open source is. The second challenge is the political will. In open source, you are open for scrutiny, co-creation, and hearing that these are the problems we are facing with the software. There is mistrust on how the technology is being deployed,” says Gaurav Godhwani, founder of CivicDataLab.

India’s contact tracing app Aarogya Setu’s Android version was also open-sourced last year after pressure from privacy activists and developers. But it came under heavy criticism from the community because the source code did not match the actual app code, and was not updated. 

A common refrain from the government is that opening up the entire code of an application or platform will make it vulnerable to attacks. 

“One of the big challenges in software is security. Software and bugs go hand-in-hand. Proprietary software does what is called ‘blackbox’ testing. In open source, the code is open, which makes it possible for many more people to look at the code, and they can do a much better job than blackbox testing,” says Satish Babu, founding director of the International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS), Kerala, and co-founder of InApp. “A fresh pair of eyes can find potential security issues better. If security by obscurity was the best way, then proprietary software like Microsoft should have been totally bug-free.”