Musings from IndiaOS

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Gangadhar

Folks from Zerodha and ERPNext organized the conference IndiaOS (india open source) conference in Bangalore. IndiaOS brought together the open source projects originating in India and also the supporters of these projects. Here’s a quick summary of what I saw and what I hope to see in the coming editions of IndiaOS.

The frappe framework is an open source framework used by ERPNext and Zerodha. ERPNext which is also an open source ERP built using Frappe framework. I was not aware of this framework until this event. I will certainly use this framework for my future projects knowing that the community is right here.
Dr. Kailash of Zerodha also spoke about their usage of FOSS. It was impressive to see their commitment to FOSS. Here is a tweet with information about their tech stack.

Some interesting #FOSS insights from @zerodhaonline at #IndiaOS pic.twitter.com/32ntjqv63O

— Gangadhar Sulkunte (@gangadhargs) January 18, 2020
Handwriting recognition for Malayalam: This is a project by Indic Project. They have built handwriting recognition software for the Malayalam language. They are looking for contributors to extend this to more Indian languages.
The story of how volunteers used open source software during the Kerala floods to coordinate the rescue efforts. The entire backstory is available here.
The last talk of the day was by Apar Gupta who opened up the definition of open to include internet freedom. This entire post was inspired by his talk. He spoke about the work of the internet freedom foundation. He wanted us to look at the issue of internet blockages in India and how it affects democracy.
A Malayalam newspaper which publishes their paper completely using open source software. They have made a lot of open source contributions themselves. Here is a tweet that shows their before and after tech stack.

When you see the before and after tech stack of Janayugam (newspaper in Kerala), their journey to FOSS is very impressive. #IndiaOS pic.twitter.com/j7GRou6rO1

— Gangadhar Sulkunte (@gangadhargs) January 18, 2020

After listening to the talks and the energy in the room, I felt that this event was a huge success. The folks who attended the event were also folks who are doers and optimists who want to make a difference. In this spirit, I feel that the next event should include talks from these folks (or folks who can cover these topics):

Open Hardware: There was a talk about open hardware at IndiaOS. Next time, we should have some workshops covering the open hardware movement with hands on sessions.
Open Communications: This was covered well by Apar in his presentation. We should include work around amateur radio and mesh networks which can help continue communications during times of internet blockade. This is also very much in tune with the times since internet blockade seems to be everywhere. Workshops on Ham Radio and mesh networks will help people to communicate at times of internet shutdowns.
Freedom and Society: This is a broad topic but I feel we should include folks like Meera working on good local journalism at Citizenmatters. Then there is the Citizens for Bengaluru, which is getting folks involved with working with government at the local level. Also should include folks like Capt. Manivannan who is working to get the government to be open in their communication and work with the public.
Open Data: Here we can do these kinds of talks:
1. Folks like Thejesh and Datameet are working towards open data. I feel we should include them to get conversations and workshops around getting our data out from the clutches of government and commercial entities.
2. Folks who have done good work on identifying data surveillance and also on how to protect yourself. For eg., Abhay Rana (aka CaptNemo), who has written extensively on how to protect yourself from the extensive surveillance. His blogpost alone is can be a half day workshop!
3. Folks who are working on freeing content from DRM. The lead developer for the open source ebook library Calibre is from Mumbai. It will be interesting to hear about his journey.

What The Acqui-Hire of Sparrow, Pulp, Wallet etc might tell us about Tech Entrepreneurship

Posted on July 20, 2012 by Gangadhar

Today, there were some buzz in the tech world about the acquisition of Sparrow by Google, Pulp and Wallet app makers Acrylic by Facebook. Getting their company acquired by a larger company to make their products bigger and stronger is a dream for most entrepreneurs. You can see from these posts (here and here) that these acquisitions (and many recent ones) were not really acquisitions but a hiring of the talented team behind these apps.

The customers are obviously unhappy about this since the products will get shelved and they might have no support or upgrades in the near future.

As an entrepreneur myself, I feel that entrepreneurs are in a tough spot. I understand how tight the money situation can be when you are building a product. If entrepreneurs who have built very successful products like Sparrow have to abandon their products to go work on other products at a larger companies, is the path for tech entrepreneurs very bleak?

My gut feel is that the tech economy where users expect most products to be free is partly responsible. Most web and mobile apps are expected to be free. If they even cost a dollar, they have to cross an extremely high bar in terms of customer expectations to be popular.If they have even the smallest of bugs, negative reviews on the stores can sink the product.

The app store model means that you pay once and get lifetime upgrades free of cost. New versions of the mobile operating systems come every year (for iOS) and every six months (for Android). The developers have to create updates to ensure that the app functions well under the new OS. But they won’t get any extra remuneration for the extra effort spent for the latest release.

So it makes sense that the founders having worked on their products for 2-3 years realize that they are better off being part of a larger company where they have better control on their financial life.

Unless, another explanation is that the larger company made an offer that they could not refuse. If you know which one it was, please let me know! As of now, I am going with the former.

Startup Depression?

Posted on March 15, 2012 by Gangadhar

You might have heard about it. Most start up founders get depressed. (Here are exhibits A, B and C). I read about it and in my naivete, I thought I was immune to it. This is a post to put my depression out into the world and hope that it also helps some other founder who might experience it during their startup life.

As with everyone, I have had my share of depression. The good thing is that I get out of it soon thanks to my awesome wife and son. So far most of these episodes have not affected me longer than a day. Like they recommend in the exhibits above, surrounding myself with awesome family and friends is a good way to get out of the d-spot when it hits you.

This time it was different. We encountered a problem with our Android app. You can read about it here. The issue was that we had done everything we could to test the app before it was released to the market and yet we encountered this problem. We even tested the app once again using the Android 2.3 emulator but we could not replicate the issue.

I have to give credit to our awesome users throughout this process. They were extremely nice and willing to provide screen shots, logs and any other information that we needed to identify this issue. One of them even sent us an email saying “Don’t be embarrassed about this problem. I am glad to help you guys since you are creating such an useful tool for people like us!”.

But even with these words of encouragement, I felt depressed. I realize now that my depression had to do with the fact that I am unable to do much about this problem (mainly because I am not developing the Android app). Looks like one of the ways I have been staying clear of depression is to meet my problems head on and take care of them. Since in this case, I cannot take a hands on approach to solve it (by writing code myself!), I felt depressed. Very.

Once I realized this, I knew that the only thing that I can do is to go to the other ways to tackle the d-situation. Go back to family and let the knowledgeable people solve the problem they know and understand very well. So I went for a walk with my son, talked about people, sky, earth and the moon and I am now back to being my normal self.

BTW, the Android problem is still unsolved. I know that having the confidence that it will be solved is almost 90% of the way there. I will hopefully post an update on that front soon.