MOSIP open-sourced the national-ID stack so any country could own its Aadhaar

After Aadhaar enrolled over a billion Indians, governments across Asia, Africa and Latin America visited India asking to replicate it. But Aadhaar was a proprietary, India-specific system that could not simply be exported — and the commercial alternative meant locking a country's foundational identity into one vendor's technology, pricing and roadmap.

In late 2018, Omidyar Network funded the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore to build MOSIP, the Modular Open Source Identity Platform. Months later the code was published free on GitHub as a digital public good: modular building blocks covering enrolment, ID issuance, verification and lifecycle management, all API-first and open-standards, so each country assembles and owns its own system.

The design attacks lock-in directly. As Privacy International's analysis of the platform notes, MOSIP's API-first, modular architecture lets governments swap components and providers instead of marrying a single integrator. Countries keep control of their data and their legal and policy choices, while standing on maintained, shared code.

By mid-2020, Morocco, the Philippines and Ethiopia had adopted MOSIP. The Philippines Statistics Authority planned to enroll 112 million citizens plus 10 million overseas Filipinos and to route social benefit transfers through the ID; Ethiopia started with a 20,000-person pilot toward a national program. New countries kept arriving weekly to learn the platform.

Give the ID stack away as a digital public good

Demand existed but Aadhaar could not be licensed abroad — openness was the only exportable form of the idea.

Open source on GitHub removed the price and procurement barrier for low-income governments.

Modular, API-first design neutralized the lock-in and switching-cost problem that made commercial ID systems risky for states.

A neutral university anchor (IIIT Bangalore) plus philanthropic funding made 'public good' credible rather than a vendor's loss-leader.

When demand for your system comes from sovereign buyers who fear lock-in, the winning move can be to stop selling and give the core away: openness becomes the product.

MOSIP became a certified digital public good anchored at IIIT Bangalore, adopted for national ID programs in Morocco, the Philippines and Ethiopia by 2020, with more countries across Asia, Africa and Latin America engaging — India's DPI model effectively exported as code.