Back when I was just beginning college and still figuring out how to get the most bang for my very limited buck, I stumbled on Linux. I’d just bought a new laptop, and getting the whole Windows setup was a bridge too far for both me and my wallet. And so, the happy, bubbly penguin Tux—Linux’s mascot—saw me through the ups and downs of my college life and early career. The likes of Linux and Open Office, a productivity suite akin to Microsoft Office, are some of the oldest open source software bundles around. In fact, Linux is almost as old as I am. In the west, the open source business is a mature market. There are multiple unicorns and businesses making billions of dollars—RedHat, MuleSoft, HashiCorp, Databricks, and more. That’s not the case in India, a market that’s notorious for its price-sensitivity. Once you give us something for free, good luck getting us to pay for it after. As it is, the open source business is notoriously difficult to monetise—how do you make money when you're giving away your raison d’etre for free? So, it’s not a surprise that India’s first unicorn in the open source sector came just a few months ago when Hasura closed a $100 million Series C fundraise at a billion-dollar valuation. The five-year-old company provides software that runs interference between the ton of data that we’ve accumulated and the developers looking to utilise said data to build tech. Its product easily translates data requests from the frontend to any database at the backend. Building an open source business is a delicate balancing act. Too open, and it’s difficult to earn and sustain; too closed, and it’s hard to grow a community of developers—a key aspect of the open source business—around it.
How did Hasura end up building a billion-dollar business around its open source software? Especially after beginning life building a proprietary product?