Supporting Webminal

We're thrilled to announce a grant of INR 8 lakhs to Webminal. It is a free, browser-based Linux terminal and learning platform that has been running since 2011 developed by Lakshmipathi G.

How it started

Around 2010, Lakshmipathi G was an ordinary developer in India, working on a Windows machine, trying to learn Linux. Documentation and tutorials have always existed. But an actual place to practice, a real shell where you typed a command and something real happened on the other side – that didn’t exist.

And he built it. The idea was to be able to simply open a Linux terminal in/on a browser.

Around the same time, on LinuxForums, Lakshmipathi met Freston, who is an engineer from the Netherlands. They started building together. Their entire coordination happened like this:

$ screen -x chat

They typed into the same shared terminal session. That was the communication channel for 5 years. It wasn't until 2015 that they saw each other's faces for the first time.

If you looked at Webminal's tech stack today, you’d be visibly confused. Python 2.7. Flask 0.12.5. Shellinabox, which stopped being maintained in 2017. User Mode Linux, which Jeff Dike wrote in 2001. Pure HTML with inline CSS.

“ Every tech conference talk would tell you this stack is wrong. But it serves 500k users and has been up for 15 years.” – Lakshmipathi.

The reason for using User Mode Linux instead of Docker is that Docker isn't real enough. When you teach disk partitioning — fdisk, LVM, RAID, mkfs — a student needs actual block devices. UML gives each user a completely independent Linux kernel, four virtual block devices, 256MB of memory, and a copy-on-write overlay. It's from 2001 and it does something modern containers still can't.

There were months when Lakshmipathi was between jobs and the server bill kept arriving. He'd sit with his savings and think about whether this was the month he finally shut it down. Then he'd find work, and the thought would go away, and the server would run another year.

The people using Webminal are mostly students, a lot of them in India, at colleges where the computer lab runs Windows, where a VM would require hardware they don't have. Most of them can't afford $4 a month. So the platform has stayed free for fifteen years. Funded, for most of that time, out of one person's pocket.

The Grant

The 8 lakh grant splits into two parts: 6 lakh as a developer stipend so Lakshmipathi can work on Webminal full-time, and 2 lakh toward infrastructure costs – the server bills that have been coming out of his own pocket for fifteen years. The milestones include – First, modernizing the codebase: moving off Python 2.7, cleaning up secrets that were hardcoded into the config, building a dashboard that shows students what they've actually completed. Second, expanding what the platform can teach. Jupyter notebooks, PostgreSQL access, hands-on tutorials for nginx and containers, with checks that stop a student from advancing until a step genuinely works. Third, a Linux kernel programming course. Fourth, features for scale — letting professors track a whole classroom's progress, a version colleges can host themselves, and outreach to universities that don't know Webminal exists yet. The infrastructure money just keeps the lights on while all of that happens.

Please read more about Webminal’s story here. You can contribute to Webminal financially through GitHub Sponsors.

If you’re an Indian FOSS project looking for support, please apply here. Find information about the grants program and previous grantees at https://fossunited.org/grants.

If you’re an organisation interested in contributing back to the ecosystem, please reach out to us at maintainers@fossunited.org