At IndiaFOSS 2024, Prof. Pankaj Jalote, Founding Director of IIIT Delhi, spoke about FOSS and Software Engg education. We have been working with Prof Pankaj Jalote over the last year and have also gotten more involved in the SDOS (Software Development Using Open Source) course. In Jan 2025, we started discussing the possibility of students contributing to mature Indian open source projects as part of this course.
The students worked on two projects last year as part of this course, namely -
- Improving the performance of fossunited.org
- Improving the accessibility of fossunited.org
More details in this thread - FOSS and Software Engg education
We are happy with the students’ work on our platform overall, and also received positive feedback from the students. This year, we are hoping to onboard more FOSS projects that are interested in getting contributions. Please see more details on the program in the message shared below -
In Jan 2026 semester, Prof. Pankaj Jalote will be teaching the course: Sw Dev using Open Source and LLMs (SDOS). In the course, students form groups of 3 or 4 and work on a project from stating the requirements to design to development and testing and finally deployment through the semester. Projects will start around mid Jan and finish April end and together the student-team is expected to put in about 40 hrs/week. They will use open source processes and tools / components / libraries / frameworks and keep their repositories on GitHub. As they are mature students, many do very good projects - in the past many projects have delivered useful applications to organizations / users.
Startups can sponsor projects for this course for developing their applications / ideas (or parts of it or enhance an existing application…). There is no fee / charge and we will ensure that software is fully transferred to the company - the only commitment the company has to make is that someone from their side will interact with the team on a regular (weekly) basis and guide them. Note that as these are 3rd year students, if the company wants, they can engage them as interns in summer or part-time workers next year to further develop the application.
If a startup is interested in sponsoring a project, it should fill this form by Nov 30. (A short form which asks for some basic information about the project and the contact person.) Given the size of the course, we will be able to accommodate only about 20-25 projects, and we will close the form when sufficient numbers are reached.
All the project descriptions will be shared with the students and interested teams will directly contact the contact-person - who can then select the team they want to work with.
Please send an email (redacted - reach out to team[at]fossunited[dot]org instead) if you need any further information.