If You’re Interested In Open Source Development, Wingify’s Paras Chopra Is Ready To Fund Your Projects

After leading Wingify to success, founder Paras Chopra has been constantly tweeting about his interest in open source and his willingness to support open source development in India.

We recently caught up with Paras Chopra during Inc42’s Facebook Live AMA to understand his plans for open source developers in India.

But before we tell you what he said, let’s give beginners a bird’s eye view of the huge market of open source.

So, as per definition, “the open-source model is a decentralised software-development model that encourages open collaboration. A main principle of open-source software development is peer production, with products such as source code, blueprints and documentation freely available to the public.”

Basically, open source encourages pooling of minds and resources to make a better product and address the bugs or issues in the present product.

So,  now that we know what Chopra is so excited about, let’s tell you what he believes in.

Paras believes that a lot of value gets created by people who are enormously skilled.  “Value creation is less about capital and more about: whether I have a really good insight or whether you have been able to build something and a lot of that value is software or technology based. Thus, I think a lot of value can be created if smart people dedicate their work and do it without expectation of return,” he added.

So What Is He Doing About It?

Chopra has been thinking of doing his bit about this and “give some sort of grants to people who want to leave their job and contribute to open source”.

So, yes, all those interested in open source, you are free to get in touch with Chopra for a quick start into open source development.

Even though India falls far behind in open source market, there are a few other startups as well who have been doing their bit for the idea.

Fynd, the startup which recently raised undisclosed amount of Series C funding from Google, introduced its open source platform, GoFynd.io. The startup has deployed open source technologies to power its mobile apps and artificial intelligence bot.

At the time, Fynd co-founder Harsh Shah said, “With so much knowledge being open sourced, it is only going to fuel the use of such technologies. Everyone can’t build everything from the scratch. Therefore, knowledge gained and shared by someone can be a good foundation, a ‘leap-frog’ point, without having to reinvent the wheel.”

Digital payments giant Paytm has also deployed its resources towards open source. Under its Build for India initiative, Paytm introduced open source incubator to “promote open source projects within the country.”

The company expects the youth to identify a problem involving design, coding, hardware, development and product management. The company shared in a blog post, “Once a project reaches a stage where it can scale and is commercially viable, we will try to connect the project team with people and organisations in the funding ecosystem like Angel Investors, Venture Capitalists, Social Sector Organisations and the Government.”

As the startup ecosystem recognises the potential and scalability of open source developments, an open source developer now has support coming for the leap into the space.

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