BANGALORE: Sayan Chowdhury couldn't believe his name would be etched on the wall of fame along with other Mozillians. The Mozilla Monument outside the company's office in San Francisco recognizes contributors who've helped the maker of the Firefox browser and other products keep the internet alive, open and accessible. Chowdhury is one among the 5,000-odd Mozilla volunteers doing his bit for the love of code.

The 23-year-old software developer in Bangalore-based coding platform HackerEarth has made it to Mozilla's roster of open source contributors for his contribution to Mozilla Kuma, a wiki platform that powers its developer network. Kuma is an open source platform written in Python using the open source web application framework Django. Chowdhury has also contributed extensively to Rust, a new programming language supported by Mozilla Research. "I translated the Mozilla interface into Hindi using a web-based translation platform called Transifex," he told TOI. That also probably won him a ticket to the Mozilla Summit held in San Francisco last October.

The open source movement has seen a renaissance of sorts over the last few years and many Indian contributors are getting global recognition for their work in the space. Some of them have made significant contributions to Fedora, an operating system based on Linux Kernel, the Chromium projects, the open-source projects behind the Google Chrome browser and operating system, and Android.

These developers don't get paid for their work, but the sheer excitement to fix something and make useful contributions is a huge encouragement.

"The contribution by Indian developers to the open source technology stack has seen a surge and this trend will continue to grow. Google has invested considerably in open source projects such as Android. Go, Dart, Angular JS, Web M are some other open source technologies that we believe in and we educate the developers to consume and contribute back through our developer community channel," said Sunil Rao, country head of Google India's startup programme.

Kushal Das's day job is of a community gardener in Eucalyptus Systems that offers open source software for building AWS (Amazon Web Services)-compatible private clouds. But he plugged into the open source community so much so that he now wears many contributions as badges of honour. Das is the only Indian to be nominated as the director of Python Software Foundation, a non-profit corporation that holds the IP rights for the Python programming language. He is also a core developer for Python and contributed to a Python script called L10n Checks. He is also an ambassador and developer for the Fedora Project. He was invited to give a technical talk at the Flock, Fedora Contributor Conference 2014, in Prague in April. "The ability to fix something and the ability to enhance something excite developers to contribute to open source projects," said Raghu Mohan, product manager in HackerEarth.

Take Anand Chitipothu. He works as a consultant in the non-profit outfit Internet Archive. He teamed up with the celebrated American computer programmer Aaron Swartz on web.py, a web framework for Python. Swartz, who was involved in the web feed development of RSS, died last year at the young age of 26. Today, Chitipothu runs the Python user group BangPypers in Bangalore.

Former Cisco and Synopsys engineer Noufal Ibrahim is a member of the board of the Python Software Foundation. Today, he runs The Lycaeum, which conducts programming workshops for engineering students in Kerala, with the idea of giving something back to the community. Siddhesh Poyarekar, a senior software developer, has made significant contributions to the GNU C Library known as Glibc.The GNU C Library, originally written by the Free Software Foundation for the C programming language, is designed to be a portable and high performance C library.

