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FOSS United grants thesis (v0)
Prelude
FOSS United Foundation was started in 2020 with one broad goal - Strengthening India’s FOSS ecosystem. Like every effort in the history of Free and Open Source Software, FOSS United was started to scratch one’s own itch.
“India is now a hub of startups, innovative consumer software, developer communities, and large scale technological infrastructure. However, somewhere along the lines, the spirit of FOSS and hacking seems to have been overshadowed. This is illustrated by the disproportionately low number of quality FOSS projects coming out of India given a thriving industry compared to the explosion of projects that has happened globally over the last decade.”
Over the last 5 years, we’ve seen immense growth in the number of quality FOSS projects, communities, successful Open Source companies and FOSS maintainers out of India. While we believe the situation has considerably improved, our goal remains the same - Strengthening India’s thriving FOSS ecosystem.
A lot more Indians will be creating FOSS over the coming decade. We want to have supported most of them during their journey.
The grants program
The FOSS United grants program aims to provide financial support to FOSS projects and events all over India. To date, we have disbursed over INR 2.5 crores towards Indian FOSS projects and maintainers. All FOSS United grantees are listed here.
We aim to provide support to FOSS projects, organisations, individuals, and communities that further our goal of strengthening India’s FOSS ecosystem through grants, fellowships, and incubation programs. These can include FOSS projects originating from India, FOSS developers and contributors who actively participate and contribute to the FOSS ecosystem, and anyone else in the digital commons space who deserves mutual assured sustenance.
Evaluations
Projects
The grants program is largely “non-thematic”. In the past, we have funded developer tools, consumer apps, non-profit foundations, FOSS mirrors, Open Hardware projects, individual contributors, and even new programming languages! We have funded well-established projects and several new experiments that we felt will have a great impact.
Our evaluation criteria for project grants have evolved to the following from learnings over several years -
- Is this an Indian origin project? Are most maintainers based out of India?
- Who is behind this project? Do they already have significant FOSS experience? Do they plan to work on this full-time? We look at the person before we look at the project.
- What is the use case? Do we know people who can relate to and comment on this?
- How many users does the project have? What is the impact of this project on those limited users?
- Is the project one of many in a crowded space? What makes it special?
- Are there existing FOSS alternatives to this project? If yes, how does it compare to them?
- Is this a niche project? How big is that niche overall? How important can this project be to that niche?
- Is the project an institutional, community, or individual effort?
- What does this project need support for? Is this a developer salary or an infrastructure grant? If this is infrastructure support, can we help them in another way by reaching out to a partner cloud/service provider, hosting their project on our servers, etc.?
- Can this project get funding elsewhere? How big is that space? Should this project even apply for a grant?
- (How) Can this project become sustainable 5 years from now?
- This is not a project. Is this program/initiative still part of the knowledge commons and fits within our broader goals?
We do not fund “ideas” or “project proposals”.
Events
Our event funding has significantly decreased over the last year. We have adopted a more selective approach towards supporting events that directly benefit the FOSS community.
- Is this an Indian event, organised by and for Indians?
- Does this event have a focus on FOSS? Is this an exclusively FOSS event?
- Does this event lead to direct/indirect creation of FOSS?
- Is this a one-off event or has it been running for several years now?
- This is a FOSS event. Do they have a list of activities, projects, etc. that came out of previous editions? Are the projects available publicly under a FOSS license?
- Does this event already have many sponsors, or is this something niche under the radar?
- This is a hackathon. Are they open to accepting the FOSS Hackathon rules?
- Who is organising this event? Does this community actively create/contribute to FOSS?
- The organiser is a student community. Are they part of a FOSS Club? Are they open to working with us long-term for FOSS student programs?
- The organiser is a professional community. Are they already embedded within FOSS United/ FOSS-adjacent communities?
- This is not an exclusively FOSS event. Do they share the FOSS ethos? Is there significant overlap between this event and the FOSS United community?
Structure
As of 2025, FOSS United Foundation has a 25L grant budget. Currently, we get around 2 event grant requests every week and almost one project grant request every month. Following the power law, 80% of our grants budget goes towards projects, which are 20% of the applications.
Projects
Events
- The average event grant size is 25k INR.
- Event grants are one-time, and we may not fund future iterations of the event.
- Our support is usually restricted to the lowest tier of the sponsorship deck and/or a diversity sponsorship that supports people from the FOSS community to participate in the event.
- We may sponsor an event to highlight a FOSS project instead of FOSS United. For example, we can sponsor a Python related event and give our sponsor booth to a Python project from the FOSS United community.
- For programming events, we prefer FOSS devsprints over weekend-long hackathons.
Changes and Future Plans
Here is a list of changes that we have made to the grants program and our plans for 2026 -
- Grant applications will be processed through a web form instead of email. We have adopted the fundingjson mechanism to accept applications as part of a broader experiment to improve discoverability for funding requirements of FOSS projects. Please apply here.
- Project grant application requires personal milestones that the grantee would like to set up for themselves to be evaluated over the course of the grant period. This should be publicised in the funding.json manifest under “funding plans”.
- We will schedule periodic check-ins with grantees to catch up on the status of the project and check in on above mentioned milestones.
- We expect at least one community engagement from grantees per quarter. This could be an event talk, a guest blog post, or a quarterly update on the forum.
- We will reach out to grantees for sessions, resources, and projects for our “FOSS in Education” programs.
- We will conduct trainings around security, accessibility, etc., for grantees with the help of maintainers and other community members as part of our maintainer programs.
- Community participation is crucial for the grants program. We are actively working with the FOSS United Governing Board to set up a Grants Working Group. The WG will oversee the grants program, while foundation staff will manage the day-to-day operations. Please find more details here.
- We will launch several Maintainer Programs to support FOSS maintainers outside of the grants program. Please find more details here.
- We want to expand on the fellowship program through initiatives like Season of Commits.
- We will set up a device donation program to enable more people to get the hardware they need.
- Grantees will be actively plugged into our “giving-back” initiatives like the FOSS Pledge and Ten Rupee Fund.
If you’re an Indian project looking for support, apply here.