Just wanted to share this tweet from Nithin that touches on something we’ve always believed in at Zerodha: A lot of what’s built here is open source, or built using it.
Remember, it is trusted by almost 2 crore Indians trust us with ~₹6 lakh crores of assets, and we contribute about 15% of daily retail exchange volumes in India.
We announced the FLOSS Fund last year:
Here’s the list of projects:
FOSS, finance, and 4th Cross, JP Nagar. Not a combo you hear every day.
Honestly, this is one of the coolest things about Zerodha. Zerodha is not just using free tools, they’re also giving back. Most companies just take and stay quiet.
More desi companies should stop being lazy and do the same. Open source is the real deal now.
i understnd that foss essentially wants to promote free tools but just curious if hypothetically u try to monetise them, how much would revenue would it be making?
This is a common misunderstanding/mistake.
Often referred to as - “think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer”.
FOSS is NOT primarily about developing software that is free of monetary cost.
There is no “hypothetically” required. Zerodha is monetizing them.
All the income generated by Zerodha’s various endeavors built using FOSS,
is an example of one way to monetize FOSS.
What % of Zerodha’s income can be directly/indirectly attributed to FOSS, compared to the rest of the income being attributed to non-FOSS?
i will let folks with knowledge of Zerodha’s internals answer that
(assuming that such a calculation were even possible to attempt).
yes, hard to say what % of rev comes from foss directly, but its a big enabler.also nice to see them actually givin back, both code n funding. keeps the whole thing goin n helps the ecosystem stay alive.
I’ve been following Nithin’s tweets for a while now, and there’s so much to learn from him.
While many businesses focus only on profits or use shady tactics, Zerodha and their team are doing something truly different — they’re working to give back to society and that too in much better way.
It’s honestly inspiring.
It would be great if @nithin could share more insights about the real impact this work is having on people and how other companies can start doing something similar, even in small ways. This is such a powerful way to grow together as a community!
Saw Nithin Kamath say “Without FOSS, there would be no Zerodha.” That got me curious. So I started digging… and wow.
Turns out, open-source software is everywhere. Your Android phone? Open source. Banks, hospitals, stock exchanges, everyone’s using it.
LIC saved ₹70 crore by switching to Linux. BSE runs its entire trading system on open-source and became the fastest exchange in the world. Flipkart? Built on tools like Kafka and Hadoop. Even Kerala schools ditched Windows for Linux. Nagaland hospitals use Bahmni, an open-source hospital system.
And Zerodha? Built completely on FOSS. They’re not just using it, they’re funding it too, with a $1 million annual FOSS grant. Infosys, Wipro and they all contribute back now.
I realized we don’t talk enough about this. FOSS isn’t just free it’s powerful, flexible, and gives us control. No vendor lock-in. No crazy license fees.
India has millions of developers. If we double down on open-source, we’re not just saving money we’re building tech that’s ours.
Seriously, more companies should follow Zerodha’s lead.
Irony is, we are discussing about FOSS, in a forum this that is powered by “discourse” which i believe is an open-source software.
I still didn’t fully understand, if it is free from any monetary payment i.e., can we freely access/copy such code/source code without paying anything for it?
Is viewing it free, but we have to pay for it, if we copy or want to run a business using such open source software ?
Is it like, if I’m going to make money using such FOSS, then I have to contribute or pay to the orginal developer for using it ?
Is it like something I can download for free and run in my own system and not pay a penny ?
What is actually free here, please help me understand this better.
There are hundreds of American VC funded startups with open source libraries. Infact, some of them are open source completely like Supabase, Redis, Docker, etc. FAANG also has big open source projects - Chromium, VSCode, React, etc
Agree that VC backed startups in the US do open source, but i think the context in india’s still diff. most vc funded cos here go all in on scale, and when chasing expectations and fast launches, imp things like self hosting infra, building on foss, or even just writing clean code often get skipped. I’ve seen this in my line of work.
Zerodha case stands out coz they’ve self hosted almost everything crm, internal systems with a small tech team. that’s what makes the open source contributions feel more real and cost driven.
Any profitable indian startup actually doin open source stuff n bein this vocal abt it?
Most of the income can be directly or indirectly attributed to FOSS. The only piece of software that is not FOSS is our Order Management and Risk Management software; everything else is FOSS: our ticketing, CRM, etc, and even my laptop, which runs on Linux and even Tradingqna.com.
Nitpick : It would be irony
if we were praising FOSS, claiming it is everywhere,
while using/relying on a non-FOSS platform to do so.
Yes. The freedoms guaranteed by FOSS-compliant licenses enable this.
These scenarios being described are of non-FOSS licenses.
Often folks offering software on such terms are trying to get the goodwill of claiming to be “open-source” without actually being open; i.e. engaging in “Open-Washing”.
Typically monetizing any FOSS that one is offering
does not involve being paid for the software itself.
Usually, it involves charging for consultation/services or custom-licensing or some such supplement.
Also, on the topic of FOSS and capitalist businesses,
one way FOSS is increasingly being deployed is to commoditize one’s complement.
Reducing the cost of other essential offerings in a value-chain,
to increase what one can charge for one’s offering in the value-chain
– i.e .claiming a larger piece of the pie for oneself.
If everything is free about FOSS, it is nothing short of a wonder.
So, we can call FOSS an “Intangible Charity” to the society.
But this got me thinking, if everything is really free about FOSS, why would someone spend their time in developing something that addresses a problem and be willing to give it away for free.
It could be like a side project for them, something they work on weekends and are happy to share with others, while still making a living from a Job or running a business.
They do it because of who they are, they believe in paying it forward, because they earlier benefited from FOSS (kinda like what Zerodha does)
They are rich enough, so they are no longer worried about making money, therefore they are willing to offer what they develop for free.
My point is, you need to be both financially secure and passionate, to be able to develop something that would take weeks/months/years and be willing to offer it for free.
Just like there are various costs associated with using and maintaining any software,
there are costs to using and maintaining FOSS.
The key distinction being that the author of the FOSS doesn’t have a monopoly on collecting the monetary costs. Anyone can do it as the source is out there for everyone to read, understand, enhance/extend the software.
Not necessarily.
What it requires is for someone to be confident in their own abilities to compete with the rest of the world on an even-footing, to offer competitive rates to support developing, running, maintaining a particular piece of software that one originally developed and released as FOSS.
and even 
