GitHub, the world's largest open source development platform, which was bought by Microsoft for $7.5 billion in 2018, is setting up its India entity in order to better serve the developer community and its own enterprise customers in the country.
India is home to GitHub’s third largest community of developers, growing 22 per cent over the last year.
The first of its two offices will be set up in Bengaluru and Hyderabad, Erica Brescia, Chief Operating Officer, GitHub, told Business Standard.
"We're building up a team across a variety of functions. We're taking a pretty holistic approach. We're hiring people to focus on (open source developer) community, on education, as well as sales and marketing, and engineering and support. So we'll have a full cross-functional team here in India and we'll be opening up multiple offices over time," Brescia said.
GitHub has appointed Maneesh Sharma as the General Manager of GitHub India.
Though GitHub operates independently of Microsoft, Brescia said the open source platform would be open to working with Microsoft's customers. "But from a business perspective, marketing community engagement and product development and strategy we (will) operate independently from Microsoft," she added.
While open source projects on the platform are free of cost, the way GitHub makes money is through private development and enterprise features. Public repositories of open source code are available free of charge on GitHub, along with some private repository access to developers.
"But for large scale private development and features that enterprises need for policy and compliance enforcement, for example, we charge for those features. In terms of India, we do have paying customers... (like) Swiggy," Brescia said.
GitHub is also expanding its channel partner programme to support GitHub Enterprise customers in running their software development operations effectively, and enable them to achieve their digital transformation ambitions.
Given that India is home to one of the largest communities of student developers in the world, GitHub will also support the next generation of developers and helping more student communities come together to learn and build on the platform.
According to data from International Data Corporation, India software market grew by 12.4 per cent year-over-year in 2019. India’s overall software market is estimated to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 14.1 per cent between 2018-2023.
Six years ago, the Indian government mandated adoption of open source software for all software applications and services of the government, to ensure projects under Digital India work with efficiency, transparency and reliability at affordable costs. This has led to greater adoption and growth of open source software in the country.
Big technology firms like Google, Dropbox, Mozilla, Quora, Intel, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Seagate, Qualcomm and IBM have extensively used open source technology for building their products.