India's largest online retailer, Flipkart is following the footsteps of Google and Facebook by opening up its technology platform for retailers. Flipkart is inviting software coders to build new applications on its technology platforms which may benefit the larger ecommerce industry, reported The Economic Times.

Founded by computer science engineers from IIT-Delhi, Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, Flipkart has so far been just a consumer of open source technology, where the source code of a software is made available freely to build new applications.

Amod Malviya, Flipkart's head of engineering, said, "The next entrepreneur will not have to build a product from scratch and if he builds something innovative and useful, Flipkart might end up consuming it."

FlipKart made its first product Phantom available to open source coders three months back. Phantom can automatically queue requests to various servers, create timeouts and in case a particular service is down, it routes the request to a fallback.

It launched its second product called HostDB last month. HostDB helps to manage data centre inventory.

Google's Android is an example of open source operating system.

The global market for Hadoop, an open source software framework for storage and large data sets, was worth $1.5 billion in 2012 and is estimated to grow over $20 billion in 2018, according to Transperancy Market research. Kiran Jonnalagadda, founder of Hasgeek, an online community for geeks said, “Worldwide, open source is completely driven by the private sector.”