Hello FOSS Enthusiast!
Welcome to our monthly newsletter from FOSS United!
Your journey into the vibrant world of Free and Open Source Software begins here!
We're excited to bring you the freshest updates, news, exciting projects, policy tweaks, and the buzz around our ongoing initiatives.
Highlights from FOSS United:
Wondering what's happening in FOSS United? Here are a few updates from our side:
What’s up with IndiaFOSS 2025?
Your favourite event of the year (and no, not Himesh Reshamiya’s Capmania tour) is only 3 months away. IndiaFOSS 2025 comes to Bengaluru from 19–21 Sept.
A million updates, but here are the top three:- Have you gotten your tickets already?
- The Call for Proposals for talks and panels is live. DEADLINE coming up!
- Diversity Sponsorships are open! Help us make space for underrepresented voices at IndiaFOSS. Last year, this supported dozens of first-time speakers and contributors. This year, we want to do more. Forward this to someone who might want to help or:
Donate
#MeetTheMaintainers, now on Forklore
This Maintainer May, we highlighted one Indian FOSS maintainer every day. May’s done, but the stories live on. Find them all on Forklore, along with quirks, confessions, and the occasional rant. Want to be featured? Submit here.FLOSS/fund’s First Tranche – $325k to 9 Projects
FLOSS/fund awarded $325,000 to 9 critical FOSS projects like OpenSSL, NTP, Krita, and ImageMagick.
This round also piloted the use of funding.json files for more transparent, discoverable funding.FOSSHack 2025 – Round 2 Results Are Out!
After rounds of reviews and reruns of demo videos, the results are here! Check out the latest list of winning teams.We Started Talking About FOSS in Tamil and Things Got Interesting
How local language discussions opened up new communities and fresh energy across Tamil Nadu.
Upcoming Events:
FOSS Meetup Delhi – 14 June 2025
FOSS Meetup Mumbai – 21 June 2025
FOSS Meetup Chennai & JSLovers – 21 June 2025
South to South AI Accountability CoLab (Virtual) – 25–27 June 2025
VizChitra – 27–28 June 2025
To view other upcoming and past FOSS events, visit the FOSS Events Timeline.
Our community thrives on respect, inclusivity, and collaboration — the Code of Conduct is here to guide us.
From the Community Corner:
Projects
Shakti: India’s first open-source industrial-grade RISC-V processor (IIT Madras)
mahaNLP: Marathi NLP library for sentiment analysis and more
OpenHands: Sign language recognition toolkit using pose-based models
Vakyansh: Speech recognition in multiple Indian languages
Bhasha-Abhijnaanam: Language ID datasets for 22 Indian languages
Indian Type Foundry Variable Fonts: Open-source fonts for scripts like Devanagari and Tamil
News and More
Major Boost for Open Source: Canonical, Zerodha, and others chip in
Post-Training & Inference for Hybrid Indic LLMs – Sarvam.ai
Digitized Divides – Tactical Tech
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- Compute Capacities for AI in India: Policy + infrastructure + geopolitics
- Census III: FOSS Usage & Risk: Most critical FOSS relies on just a few maintainers
Internet Standards Almanac – Article 19
AI Doesn’t Need More Energy — It Needs Less Concentration of Power
AI Regulation Taxonomy – apples vs oranges, globally
AI Therapy as Surveillance – The Verge
Grants & Opportunities
floss.fund: Supports critical FLOSS projects globally
Connecting the Unconnected Funding Program – Internet Society
We hope you found this month's updates insightful and exciting.
Your active participation and feedback are what make our community thrive.
If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to reach out at foundation@fossunited.org.
We invite you to join our Telegram group. It’s a fantastic way to stay connected and hear about all things FOSS United.
Thank you for being an integral part of our journey. Let’s keep fostering innovation and collaboration in the FOSS world.
"May the FOSS be with you"
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