Notes from the "FOSS at organisations" BoF at IndiaFOSS 2025

IndiaFOSS Conference
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The FOSS at organisations BoF session at IndiaFOSS was an effort to bring together CXOs, engineering managers, FOSS project creators (especially devtools etc.), OSPO teams and anyone else interested in implementing FOSS within their orgs, or to share learnings from their experience of adopting a FOSS stack.

Thanks to @James_Reilly for helping moderate this discussion.

I lost my notes from this session and am writing down things from memory. Please reach out to me over email/DM if you participated in the discussion and want me to make any edits to this post.

We had representatives from the following organisations -

  • Improwised Technologies
  • ZEISS
  • Indium Software
  • Capgemini
  • Ente
  • HEV
  • Zerodha
  • OASIS
  • Tech4Good Community
  • Bruno
  • Linaro
  • Frappe
  • Gooey AI
  • Kinara Capital

The discussion was centered around these major questions -

  • How does your company adopt and assess FOSS? (tools used etc.)
  • Is “Shadow IT” a factor in your companies use/adoption/rejection of FOSS?
  • How do you contribute back?

ZEISS

  • ZEISS is playing an active role in the global open source community
  • They have an outbound FOSS policy meaning if employees make a bug fix/feature release on an open source project, that is contributed upstream.
  • Employees recommend FOSS projects that they use and would like for ZEISS to donate to.
  • They use/contribute to/maintain Backstage, Tyk, Argo CD, Conan, Kreya
  • ZEISS is not a tech company and is primarily involved in research and manufacturing. But they can’t do that without FOSS either. They are excessively consuming FOSS for scale and secrets.

Bruno

  • Bruno is an OSS API testing client and a popular alternative to Postman.
  • Internally they like to go for the best available tool and FOSS adoption is not a huge priority.
  • Reliability and longevity is a major factor when considering adoption.

Improwised

  • Heavy users of ERPnext.

Zerodha

  • Zerodha is one of the most prominent supporters of FOSS in India.
  • Their entire stack is built on top of FOSS - zerodha.tech/stack
  • They actively acknowledge, contribute and give back to FOSS projects.
  • They recently launched a $1mn fund for FOSS projects - floss.fund
  • They also create FOSS in house - Libredesk, listmonk, logchef.
  • Extensive users of ERPnext and frappe for internal and back office work.

Frappe

  • Frappe is the publisher of ERPnext and is a 100% open source company.
  • Giving Back to Our Dependencies | Frappe Blog
  • There is no mandatory requirement to use FOSS internally but they prefer to use FOSS wherever possible.
  • They have also been giving back to the community for a very long time. in 2016 they founded the ERPnext foundation, which was later subsumed to FOSS United foundation with a broader goal in mind.
  • FOSS is in their DNA and everything that they do is by default open source.
  • Runs the Frappe Cloud marketplace to ensure a sustainable partner apps ecosystem. They are actively discussing mandating the apps on marketplace to be open source too.

OASIS alliance and Tech4Good Community

  • OASIS alliance helps build tech capacity in the social sector by connecting NGOs who need help with tech vendors who can implement solutions.
  • T4GC extensively does tech implementations in the social sector.
  • The non profit sector does not care about Open Source. They usually want to go for the cheapest available option.
  • T4GC creates OSS solutions for the clients and hands off the project to them, so they take decisions on licensing etc. A non profit may decide to eventually make the project close sourced but it was noted that these orgs adopting FOSS is a great first step in itself.

Linaro

  • 95% of their work is contributing to FOSS.
  • Naturally, they are also heavy users of Open Source Software. But there is no strict policy for employees on what to use.

FOSS tools mentioned during the session -

  • Kubernetes
  • Backstage (Patform Eng.)
  • Tyk (API Gateway)
  • Argo CD
  • Conan
  • Kreya (gRPC client)
  • Bruno
  • ERPnext
  • Frappe
  • Netbird
  • Ansible
  • Docker
  • Ghost
  • AOSP
  • QEMU

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