Over the last year, we’ve talked to several FOSS maintainers from India and plan to talk to a lot more as part of Maintainer Programs to understand how we can help them directly (through grants etc.) and indirectly.
This forum thread will document our conversations with these folks. If you’re an Indian FOSS maintainer please feel free to reach out to us.
Anubhav was awarded a grant from FOSS United earlier this year. More details in this post - Supporting Malhar
Notes
He was working on Malhar for the last 2 months - recently added memory safety framework and has now started applying similar ideas to Hachi as well. A blog post is pending explaining the motivation and ideas.
He wants to continue working on the framework until he has a demo, and may start working on it part-time later.
Already tested it on 5L images, and he mentioned that it is better than other alternatives.
“Benchmarking for some users could be a triggering topic, so to be clear , performance seems to be much better for Indexing pipeline, Inference pipeline and in terms of required dependencies for hachi!”
He is looking for projects that would be willing to experiment with Hachi. He would like to test on more diverse datasets to access the performance and to get more feedback.
He never expected the project would be usable and is happy with the results.
“Would like for project to be sustainable, maybe by allowing users to pay for extensions , for example an extension that indexes data directly from android or google drive. Complete functionality would always be available to use and test on local file-system, users are free to develop their own extensions. Its at core is a search engine, and such engines are a big part of our gateway to access stored information on which we depend on in even critical situations , so hachi/malhar will never put bar on any type of information access i.e paid-features (if any) will always be de-coupled from original/core product. (in case it becomes useful for enough users)”
Thoughts on the grant
The financial grant was of great value
We should ask more questions when evaluating a grant and maybe allow projects to set up some personal milestones.
"I know it is difficult to (fairly) access a grant proposal due to a large number of factors. But at same time i believe a network of domain-specific academics or industry experts could look deeper into the application to ask a bunch of follow up questions conditioned on domain. This would definitely result in a longer approval process !
I believe as India’s IT is industry is service oriented, there is generally less incentive to work at deeper/systems’ level for professionals, and this is something that should be encouraged i.e compiler/programming language development, database development or ML frameworks , may be through relatively smaller grants giving user/grantee atleast some time/freedom to refine/improve their ideas.
CTA
We’ll try out the demo and share feedback. (please let us know if you want to try as well and we’ll put you in touch with Anubhav).
We will setup another conversation to discuss the the infra requirements which are a hurdle currently for the live demo
We will put him in touch with ente, frappe, rethink, and others who can test Hachi and give feedback.
He is happy to work on a guest blog post. We need to reach out to him for this once we have setup a maintainers blog.
Prasun is also a FOSS United Grantee. Details here - Supporting Zasper
He mentioned he has to invest a lot of time in making tutorials for the project.
UI is not smooth currently. Need some design + UI/UX help with the project.
-He isn’t finding enough time to polish Zasper Hub. The project is yet to be open-sourced.
Need to invest in cloud credits for Zasper Hub
Financial support - We discussed a potential follow-on grant primarily for contributions to the project (Season of Commits), and a smaller travel grant to be able to showcase the project at other events.
We should find people who can also contribute to the project in other areas -
Accessibility
Localisation and translation
He wants to explore Dual licensing options for the project, and also understand how to deal with companies that have strange procurement policies (eg. blanket ban on GPL).
Prasun will get back with his infrastructure costs
-We will talk to AWS, e2e, Cloudflare and other cloud providers we know for credits for FOSS projects.
Prasun will let us know if he wants to participate as a project for the IIITD course next semester.
We will put him in touch with folks at Legalitech for license advice.
He will work on an “Architecture of Zasper” blog post for the AOSA reading group (WIP)
Prashanth is the creator of Scrite. We had a chat regarding a potential grant along with other ways we can help the project.
He said that he wishes Scrite also had -
More languages
More input tools (google input tools, CDAC tools) [help needed]
Input for linux
A non english spell check
Thoughts on AI
He is not keen on story generation using AI but it can be of help with review, translation, pitch deck, visualisation etc. We can probably add some agents as well.
We need to figure out how to go about this in a C++ codebase.
Sessions on integrating AI will be useful.
We will put him in touch with a few folks we know who are working on similar things right now.
Marketing
Word of mouth has been the primary means of getting users so far.