The future is Open Source

Edited excerpts from an exhaustive video interview with Marshal Correia VP & GM-India, South Asia, Red Hat...

“The Open Source movement started in MIT in the early 1970s. Basically what it means is: You do a software distribution along with the source code so that others can use it, modify it and further develop it. That was the basic premise. Over the years it went from strength to strength. Now whatever you do today: You book your airline ticket. You go to the ATM and withdraw money. You do a UPI transaction. If you do something with your Aadhaar or GSTN, you would have touched Open Source somewhere. It is that pervasive.

The Open Source community is large. When many people work on solving a problem, it gets solved. The technology is used for enabling the business, it has become a backbone of the business, and it is even at the front and center of the business.

From Linux to the Cloud

One of the first big successes of Open Source was in Operating Systems: Linux. Today you see many mission-critical platforms and workloads running on Linux. Nowadays we talk of Open Hybrid Cloud. There is no lock-in: It gives you freedom and offers you choices. During the pandemic, there was a need for flexibility and agility. That led to more acceptance of the cloud. There was a lot of public cloud infrastructure that was built in the country. On top of the cloud, in order to accelerate Digital Transformation, there was a need to build modern applications, what we call cloud-native applications. A lot of innovation happened around the cloud. All this change had to be managed by automation. In the cloud, the Kubernetes container was a big thing that evolved. That gave you the acceleration to build your say smartphone app and a lot of flexibility.

What Red Hat does here is work with communities. We take up some projects and kind of convert them into a product as an enterprise software with scalability, a clear roadmap, providing security with innovation.

The future is Open Source

Look at the very vibrant startup ecosystem in India. All of them are using technology whether they want to deliver goods or want to build products. Even in the government. We as citizens use a lot of services like Aadhaar and taxation. Everywhere at a platform level, you will find Open Source.

No one knows what the future holds. It is changing rapidly with the advent of 5G, Edge, and Industry 4.0. There is continuous innovation happening. There are millions of developers who are part of the community. They are trying to solve many complex challenges. Whatever new technology and innovation are happening, take blockchain or AI-ML, all the pillars of Digital Transformation, people are building on top of Open Source and are thus differentiating their businesses.

These are excerpts from a video chat with Editor Sunil Rajguru and part of our PCQuest 35 Years Series on the Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow of Technology.

Check out the complete interview...