Digital public goods

Digital public goods are open software, open data, open standards and open AI models that anyone may use, change and share for free. They are usually built by nonprofits, governments or universities, and paid for by grants and government contracts, not by sales. Any city, state or country can take one and run it for its own people, without paying a licence fee. India built several of its shared national systems with government and nonprofits working together, and has produced several digital public goods.

Here is how it works in general. A builder writes the software, or collects the data, and publishes it under an open licence: a legal permission that lets anyone use, change and share it. The code is put in a public repository, where anyone can read and download it. A government that needs the same service takes a copy. It changes the parts that differ, such as the language, the tax rules or the forms, and runs the software on its own servers or in a cloud. It often hires an IT services firm to set it up and run it. Fixes and new features can be sent back to the original project, so that every user benefits. The government owns its copy and its data, and is not tied to one vendor. Being tied to one vendor is called vendor lock-in.

To be recognised as a digital public good, a project is usually expected to meet a few conditions besides the open licence. It must protect people's privacy, avoid harm, and serve a public need such as health, education or farming.

Take, for example, a municipal corporation that wants citizens to pay property tax online. Instead of buying a product, it can run digital public infrastructure for cities built by a nonprofit, which many Indian cities and states already use.

Consider an AI farming assistant that answers farmers' questions in their own languages. Nonprofits build such advisers on AI models, so that the same tools can later be reused by other states or countries.

For instance, an open-source platform for national identity, first built at an Indian institute, has been taken up by other countries to issue ID numbers to their own citizens.

How are digital public goods different from digital public infrastructure? Digital public infrastructure is a running national system that everyone uses, such as Aadhaar or UPI. A digital public good is a building block that anyone may copy and run for themselves. Some infrastructure is built from digital public goods, but not all of it. UPI, for example, is run by one organisation, and its code is not free to copy. Digital public goods are also different from the open source business model. There, the code is free too, but a company earns by selling subscriptions and support for it. In India, both kinds of public software serve government services.