Indian open source ventures take on Google Photos, SAP

Bengaluru hosted the 5th edition of IndiaFOSS (Free and Open Source Software) over the weekend. Those lucky enough to attend it would have been pleasantly surprised at the complexity and ambition of some of the open-source ventures being undertaken by young engineers from across the breadth of the country.

Take the case of Ente, an open source project that’s trying to provide an alternative to Google Photos. Ente’s founder and CEO Vishnu Mohandas left a promising career at Google to build a privacy-preserving photo space people could trust. “We’re very ambitious. What’s the point of doing anything small?” he quips.

Mohandas argues that while big tech excels at security, it fails at privacy. “Photos reveal so much about us that platforms can know more about you than you know yourself,” he explains. Ente’s users get 10GB free, pay only for additional storage, and crucially, own their data completely.
Because the code is open, anyone can inspect or deploy it. The apps run on Android, iOS, web and desktop; the team uses Flutter for mobile and TypeScript/React for web and desktop, so your photos stay the same across devices without handing unnecessary data to advertisers.
“Ente is fully open source and bootstrapped. We are profitable. We have stored over 300 million photos so far and we handle around 1 million new photos every day,” Mohandas adds.

The enterprise pioneer
At 18 years old, Frappe may be India’s most accomplished open source success story. What started as one entrepreneur’s solution to expensive ERP software has evolved into a comprehensive business operating system that rivals enterprise giants like SAP—while remaining completely free and open.

ERPNext, Frappe’s flagship product, delivers everything a modern business needs: finance management, inventory control, customer relationship management, human resources, and helpdesk functionality. Built on the Frappe Framework—a low-code development toolkit—the system powers thousands of companies worldwide, from small manufacturers to large enterprises.

The key to Frappe’s success lies in solving enterprise software’s fundamental problems. Traditional ERP systems trap businesses in expensive per-user licensing models and vendor lock-in. “We are 100% open source. We are not partially open source who then force you to pay to unlock features,” explains COO Neha Sankhe. Companies can deploy ERPNext themselves at no cost, customise it freely, and escape the punitive seatbased pricing that makes enterprise software prohibitively expensive as organisations grow.

Open source in India is also turning physical. Anyone familiar with a Raspberry Pi will immediately recognise the significance of Mecha Systems’ open source venture. The company’s first product, Mecha Comet, is a programmable handheld computer that was showcased earlier this year at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas and was a huge hit at the event.

“Smartphones are amazing, but you can only do what the manufacturer allows. We want a computer that lets you go through all the layers—hardware and low-level software—and install anything you want. That is what we mean by giving rights back to the consumer,” says Mecha Systems founder and CEO Shoaib Merchant.

In everyday language: Mecha Comet is a small Linux computer you can hold, open and tinker with. Unlike locked-down phones, you can plug into the guts—chips, firmware, operating system—and learn by building. That matters for education and for cultivating hardware skills in India, because students and engineers get a real device whose internals are documented and modifiable.

It took Shoaib and his team years of tinkering with iterations to reach this point. “Hardware iteration takes a lot of time. A single PCB iteration takes three months, our PCB has 900 components. We have done this for three years and are now moving to mass production. We have 30,000 people on our waiting list.”

Opportunities in global markets
Another interesting angle to India’s open source story is the opportunities that lie in creating software for regulated industries that require onpremises deployment for various compliance reasons – like finance and defence sectors. Plane Software saw this demand clearly in 2022, especially after Jira, the popular issuetracker from Atlassian, began retiring its self-hosted editions. Atlassian stopped selling new server licences in 2021 and ended server support in 2024, pushing customers toward cloud and data centres. This created an opportunity that Plane’s team took full advantage of.

“Plane is a modern open-source project-management tool. Our community edition is free and you can self-host it on your own infrastructure. We also offer an enterprise edition,” says co-founder and COO Vihar Kurama. “When Jira shut down its self-hosted products, regulated industries still needed control and compliance. That is where Plane fits.”

Early adopters of Plane’s open source software, which includes the likes of Zerodha, Sony, Aramco, and Dolby, validated the approach. Plane’s community edition runs free on customer infrastructure, while enterprise features and support generate revenue from large teams.

On the creative-tools front, Scrite shows how one developer’s itch to solve a problem can end up helping tens of thousands worldwide. “Scrite is an open-source desktop screenwriting app. It takes a structure-first, scene-centric approach and lets you write in multiple Indian languages,” founder Prashant Udupa told the audience at IndiaFOSS this year. The impact is measurable: “Close to 45,000 writers around the world have used the app, about 30,000 in India. We launched paid plans this year and around 1,500 people have subscribed.”

Think of Scrite as a smart writing board. You break your film into scene cards, shuffle them, track characters and pacing, and export properly formatted scripts. It also generates reports—like who speaks how much and where—which helps directors plan shoots and budgets. Because it is open source, filmmakers and developers can request features or contribute code that benefits everyone.

Zerodha co-founder and CTO Kailash Nadh, who has been a FOSS hacker for over 20 years and is a member of the FOSS United Foundation, says that a huge number of high quality open source projects are coming out of India, and that they deserve a lot more attention, especially when you consider the multiplier effect that building such technologies confers to a society.

“When we start building highquality stuff here in India rather than just consuming what is made elsewhere, it automatically and implicitly deepens our tech capacity as a society,” he observes.