Indian universities and eminent technical institutes have spent at least ₹134 crore over the last five years on licences for proprietary software, the open source advocacy FOSS United said, citing responses to queries sent by the collective under the Right to Information Act, 2005.
“Institutions spend crores every year, teaching students software they will never own,” FOSS United said on a portal dedicated to mapping different higher education and research institutes’ software spending. FOSS stands for free open source software.
The spending likely represents only a portion of the overall money spent by institutes for software, used for everything from email, engineering design, assignment submission tools, electronic design automation (EDA) tools for chip design, and so on.
Technology sovereignty
Sai Rahul Poruri, FOSS United’s CEO, told The Hindu that there was tension between the Union government’s push for technological sovereignty and the continued use of proprietary software by third parties that can withdraw their services at any time. “Technology sovereignty is unfortunately applied in an incredibly narrow lens, essentially as the geopolitical need of the hour, instead of applying the lens at geopolitical tech dependence across industries.”
Mr. Poruri said that the spending he cited was likely only around 15-20% of premier public institutes. “We haven’t even captured the IITs’ spending, which is likely an order of magnitude higher given their reliance on engineering software,” he said. “Based on the roughly ₹25 crore per annum figure we currently have, it’s not hyperbole to assume ₹200 crore of annual spending on software licences across the higher education industry, at the very least.” That would come out to ₹1,000 crore over a five-year period.
Centre’s policies
The Union government has put in place policies encouraging the use of open source software within the government, but in many areas proprietary lock-ins continue to guide decisions. One example is the semiconductor industry. At a press conference on the notification of the India Semiconductor Mission’s second phase on August 31, Union Information Technology Secretary S. Krishnan said the government would encourage open source frameworks like RISC V to build chips. However, the IT Ministry would continue to help startups and academia with access to proprietary platforms that are widely used in industry.
“We may use, in certain cases, mature platforms like the ARM platform and the IBM Power Platform,” Mr. Krishnan said. “The idea of using more mature platforms is to make sure that we have an India-made chip relatively faster with adequate Indian IP in it.”
Mr. Poruri said that he had had success in working with colleges to integrate building open source software that compete with proprietary platforms being sold to universities and firms. “Higher education structured around proprietary software is fundamentally incompatible with first-principles thinking, because tool usage is taught instead of foundational understanding,” Mr. Poruri argued.
“Transitioning to using and building open source tools will help students build multi- and transdisciplinary skills. Given the ease with which AI can generate code today, it is possible to enable students to learn by building, instead of learning by using,” he added.
