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Project of the year
This award goes to a project that had a breakout year - achieved significant growth, went a major release, community adoption, or simply a new project that is solving a novel problem!
Choose your pick
CARE
Scrite
Safedep projects
Ente
XenevaOS
Bruno
0voters
The endorsements the above candidates received have been added as replies to this thread. If you’re a nominee, you’re welcome to post a brief endorsement below. Tell the community about your work in 2025-2026. Replies on this thread are reserved for nominees only.
Abhisek Datta and Safedep are helping improve the security landscape of the entire FOSS ecosystem - their work with Threat Intelligence Data Hub (Threat Intelligence Data Hub — SafeDep - Real-time Open Source Software Supply Chain Security) and Abhisek’s posts on social media, e.g., LinkedIn, have brought awareness about compromised packages to a larger and broader Indian audience than ever before. They continue to innovate and create new FOSS projects to solve problems in the software security space and speak at conferences and private events to bring awareness to the significant change in the FOSS security landscape since the arrival of GenerativeAI, including speaking to reporters on the topic, e.g., Vibe Coding Boom Leaves Security Backdoors Open.
Abhisek, through his work with safedep, is effectively acting as a maintainer for the FOSS security landscape in India, and that’s a laudable effort.
Beyond maintaining some very crucial projects in the security space, Abhisek and the folks at Safedep also do the important task of continuously spreading awareness about packages with vulnerabilities. Their work is crucial to the FOSS ecosystem!
Ente
It’s not easy building a consumer app, especially not when the app goes against established giants like Google Photos or Apple/iCloud Photos. Even if someone were delusional enough to think that they could go against such goliaths, doing so without VC money feels impossible in the current business climate. And to top it all off, releasing the app under a copyleft license feels like the final nail in the coffin of such a business.
But Vishnu and ente defied all of the usual tropes and expectations - and we (FOSS United) have had a front row seat to their growth over the past two years. They continue to be good citizens of the FOSS ecosystem, and they are among a handful of companies that hire people to directly work on FOSS projects.
While other COSS projects have become successful over the past year, I strongly believe that Ente stands above the rest, because of the market that they are choosing to compete in.
On-device AI features for Photos is a ground breaking achievement. How many other Photos app do this, just for the sake of end-user privacy? One of the few dozen projects world-wide Mozilla Builders “Local AI” program has sponsored.
Shipping a high-quality MFA (second factor app) product that CERN (Switzerland), one of the foremost scientific institutions of our time, uses is an incredible brag.
Building a 10,00,000 ARR business, growing quadratically, in a landscape where you’re competing with an excellent free product used by billions in Google Photos, brick by brick, in the open, attempting to match feature-by-feature, all the while being shamelessly copied by at least two other competitors… is phenomenal.
Ente is a great example of a product being built from India for the world (literally - since most of their users are from outside India), in a truly open way. Competing with Google is a brave decision in itself, and choosing to do it the way the Vishnu has speaks volumes - Building a FOSS consumer app from India
XenevaOS
XenevaOS started as a hobby kernel project about 5 years ago. Today, it is a full-fledged mission to develop an Indigenous, Modern Operating System with a Custom Kernel built entirely from the ground up right here in India.
While technological sovereignty is one of the major factors, the OS also aims to provide strong real-world utility and solve modern computing challenges that current mature Operating Systems face, most notably for XR (AR/VR) use cases.
The project has grown significantly over the last few months since its public debut at IndiaFOSS 2025. What began as an open-source hobby project is now firmly on the path to becoming a mature Open Source Software.
In the past year, with lakhs of lines written into the codebase, the OS evolved from having a minimal GUI running on a single architecture via virtualization (x86_64) to supporting multiple architectures (ARM, RISC-V) and real bare-metal hardware with an advanced software stack & GUI. Gaining significant interest and active attention from the community over the last couple of months, the project is set to release a usable public version in the coming few months.
One would be suprised to know there are people in India rewriting kernels from Scratch. And some of them are in their first year of college
Bruno
One of the best open source alternatives to Postman and very regularly updated
Bruno has become one of the most popular Open Source products to have come out from India in the recent years, and Anoop has been an integral part of the FOSS United community - as a participant, speaker, and now a donor trying to give back to the ecosystem that supported them. I’m very excited to see Bruno’s journey, and for it to soon dethrone Postman
CARE
CARE received 12 nominations! I am skipping some for the sake of not making this post too long.
Open Healthcare Network (OHC) is an open-source Digital Public Good dedicated to making high-quality healthcare accessible and affordable. Through its flagship CARE platform and related open-source projects, OHC enables hospitals, public health institutions, and governments to digitize clinical workflows while remaining transparent, community-driven, and vendor-independent.
The project has demonstrated significant real-world impact by supporting healthcare delivery across multiple Indian states and helping improve care for more than 200,000 people. Its software powers clinical workflows including patient management, hospital operations, intensive care coordination, and telemedicine, allowing healthcare professionals to provide better care even in resource-constrained environments.
One example is the TeleICU initiative, where specialists remotely support district hospitals managing critically ill patients. This model has enabled patients in underserved regions to receive expert care closer to home, reducing unnecessary referrals, improving continuity of care, and supporting better clinical outcomes.
Beyond its healthcare impact, OHC is built as a true open-source community. Its code, documentation, and development process are open to contributors worldwide, encouraging collaboration among developers, designers, clinicians, and public health professionals. The project demonstrates how open-source software can strengthen public healthcare infrastructure at scale.
Open Healthcare Network represents the spirit of Free and Open Source Software by combining technical excellence with measurable social impact. Its commitment to openness, community collaboration, and improving healthcare access makes it an outstanding candidate for the IndiaFOSS Project of the Year award.
Care has supported multiple hospitals around the country for a while now, and is fully HL7 compliant, making it the most sensible hospital management software and teleicu software in India.
CARE deserves this award because it shows how open source can solve real public healthcare problems. Built by OHCN, it helps hospitals manage patients, staff, facilities, consultations, inventory and critical resources in one connected system. What stands out is that CARE is open, adaptable and built for real-world use. It gives healthcare organizations a practical alternative to fragmented, proprietary software while creating lasting public value.
As a contributor on CARE, I’ve seen firsthand how much care goes into keeping this codebase genuinely open not just source-available, but built such that outside contributors can actually ship meaningful changes into systems running in real hospitals.
I’m nominating it because I’ve watched the maintainers prioritize clean, reusable architecture over quick fixes, mentor new contributors through GSoC instead of gatekeeping, and stay disciplined about keeping the core generic enough that any hospital or government can adopt it, even when it would’ve been faster to hardcode one-off solutions. That commitment is why CARE scaled to many hospitals across India instead of staying a pandemic-era side project. It deserves recognition for proving that “open source” and “mission-critical infrastructure” aren’t at odds.
