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Updated – September 04, 2026 06:29 pm IST – NEW DELHI
Image used for representative purpose only.
| Photo Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto
Indian universities and eminent technical institutes have spent at least ₹134 crore over the last five years on licences for proprietary software, the open source advocacy FOSS United said, citing responses to queries sent by the collective under the Right to Information Act, 2005.
“Institutions spend crores every year, teaching students software they will never own,” FOSS United said on a portal dedicated to mapping different higher education and research institutes’ software spending. FOSS stands for free open source software.
The spending likely represents only a portion of the overall money spent by institutes for software, used for everything from email, engineering design, assignment submission tools, electronic design automation (EDA) tools for chip design, and so on.
