About FOSS United Foundation

FOSS United Foundation is a registered non-profit founded in 2020, dedicated to the cause of building Free and Open Source (FOSS) projects and communities in India. It is the successor of the ERPNext foundation (founded in 2016) which had the same broad goals. The foundation was started as a collaboration between the teams at Frappe, the publisher of ERPNext, one of the largest FOSS projects out of India, and Zerodha. Currently, we have 6 Industry partners and inviting more organization to join us. More details can found on the partner's page.

The foundation, currently in its infancy, aims to provide grassroots support to FOSS projects and events, and evolve into a community-industry collaboration with a diverse group of members and patrons.

Goals

India is now a hub of startups, innovative consumer software, developer communities, and largescale 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.

In the Indian context, our goals are:

To promote the spirit of hacking and tinkering.
To build quality FOSS for public good.
To enable and evangelise the use of FOSS in academia, social sector, industry and government.

Team

Alfiya Hussain

Alfiya works as Graphics Designer for FOSS United. She enjoys meeting new people in particular and learning new things from them. She loves to read, blog and draw.

Prakash Hogade

Prakash helps FOSS United with accounts and financials. In his free time, Prakash loves to read and help people around him.

Riya P Mathew

Riya works on community management and evangelism, and in particular, the mon.school project at FOSS United. She is a Python Developer who tinkers with ML and loves to code, read, and sing.

Venkatesh Hariharan

Venky helps FOSS United with public FOSS policy research, initiatives, and outreach. He is the India representative for the Open Invention Network, an organization that protects the global FOSS community from patent litigation. He is also a member of the Governing Board of the Software Freedom Law Center, a law firm that represents FOSS communities and defends digital rights.

Vinay Kumar

Vinay helps with the FOSS grants program and FOSS-for-NGO projects at FOSS United in addition to volunteering at events. He's a fullstack developer and maintains large financial systems at Zerodha.

Vishal Arya

Vishal is the full time, one-person-army at FOSS United who does everything, whatever needs to be done, so that the foundation and its goals tick forward. He is passionate about building communities and organising community events.

Active volunteers

Aakansha Doshi

Aakansha is an open-source enthusiast, Javascript and React fan. She is one of the core maintainers of Excalidraw. She is a big foodie, loves traveling and spending time with her family. More on her website

Abhinav Raut

Abhinav is a full stack developer and helps FOSS United with tech.

Amit Kucheria

Amit has been a FOSS tinkerer for over two decades, mainly on the Linux kernel and Zephyr RTOS.

At mBedrock, he helps solve challenging problems that require custom electronics and FOSS and then bring those designs to mass market using their PCBKingdom turnkey electronics manufacturing platform.

Devdutt Shenoi

Devdutt is an active contributor to various FOSS projects and communities. He also works as a systems engineer and helps organize events for the Rust India community in his free time.

Krutika Thakkannavar

Krutika is a UI/UX designer and helps FOSS United with design and branding and organising meetups. She does a lot of pro-bono work for non-profits.

Poruri Sai Rahul

Rahul has a background in Physics and is a Scientific Software Developer during the week. On weekends, after pursuing a short course at the Takshashila Institution, he is trying to understand FOSS policy in India.

Sejal Jain

Sejal helps in keeping things going at FOSS United Delhi and has been part of the team organising DelhiFOSS conference. She is a Software Engineer in the making and loves spending time with her family when she is not coding or playing a sport.

Shrilakshmi Shastry

Shrilakshmi is a front-end developer and an accessibility enthusiast. She loves to spend time tinkering around different technologies and community building.

Vishnu Sudhakaran

Vishnu is a fullstack developer and has been a part of numerous developer communities and events (Mozilla and Google to name two) and has the super power of organising anything, anywhere, at any time, and helps FOSS United with whatever is required, from events to vendors.

Board

Founding directors

Kailash Nadh

Kailash has been a hobbyist developer for over two decades. He published his first FOSS project in 2002, a blogging platform. He is the CTO at Zerodha, India's largest stock broker.

Rushabh Mehta

Rushabh is the Founder and CEO of Frappe and creator of the Frappe Framework. Frappe is the publisher of ERPNext, the world's most popular FOSS ERP project. He talks about his work and shares his views on his blog.

Contact

Write to us at foundation@fossunited.org or send us a message on the forum.

Join our Telegram Community.