MOSS is Mozilla’s helping hand to the open-source ecosystem in India

In a bid to support the fledging open-source ecosystem in India, Mozilla has started its Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS) programme under which it will promote free software and open-source projects in India. Mozilla has set aside a total of around Rs 1.4 crore to fund India-based projects or programmes supporting open source in the current year. Jochai Ben-Avie, Senior Global Policy Manager of Mozilla Corporation, told ET that Mozilla was born out of the free software and open source movement. As a result, the programme started with the effort to give back to those communities, along with supporting other free software and open-source projects and helping advance those projects around the world. “India has always been a really important country for development, and also for Mozilla. As part of the opensource ecosystem, we have a lot of volunteer contributors around 30,000 of them out of which close to 10,000-20,000 are in India. So India is by far our largest community,” said Ben-Avie. He added that the firm wants to give back to the ecosystem and to the open-source movement in India through this programme.

Soon after coming to power, the NDA government released a policy that called for open source software to be used as part of the Digital India initiative.

Ben-Avie said that the government set an example through the open-source policy. “There are opportunities to further develop that down to the school level as we know that the computer science development are major topics of interest in Indian universities and spreading understanding of open source philosophy and technologies is key,” he added.