India has become the fifth-largest contributor to Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) open source projects, and its contributions are steadily climbing, according to the foundation.
Jonathan Bryce, Executive Director of CNCF, told Mint on the sidelines of the Cloud Native Hyderabad summit, “If you look at the numbers across all CNCF projects, India is the number 5 contributor, but it’s been climbing. India obviously has a massive and very strong software development scene, and it’s a really important region for us.”
He noted that companies such as Red Hat have large engineering teams in India that are deeply involved in CNCF projects.
Meanwhile, services companies are also driving adoption of CNCF’s open source technology.
“We have a lot of services companies helping international enterprises implement CNCF technologies internally,” Bryce said.
Bryce also cited the example of Infosys’ work with a US-based automaker to roll out a platform engineering system that saved the company $5 million a year by cutting developer onboarding from months to days.
DeepSeek pivotal moment for AI:
Bryce also talked about the role of open source in the emerging artificial intelligence ecosystem where Chinese AI startup DeepSeek shocked the incumbent frontier labs like Google and OpenAI with the global rollout of its competent open source models earlier in the year.
“I think the release of DeepSeek R1 was a really pivotal moment for AI,” he said. “Leading up to that point, there were some open weights models out there, but most folks viewed them as pretty far behind the frontier models that proprietary labs were operating.”
He noted that DeepSeek’s release “completely changed the landscape of AI. And it’s hard to overstate how important that moment was.” The jolt to frontier AI labs, he added, has “triggered faster innovation” and forced top AI companies to “innovate faster as well.”
Bryce also references OpenAI’s oss open source models which were released by the ChatGPT maker last month.
