Funding and Grants
The FOSS United grants program aims to provide financial support to FOSS creators,
maintainers, projects and events all over India. To date, we have disbursed over INR 3
crores towards Indian FOSS projects and maintainers. All FOSS United grantees are
listed here.
We fund FOSS projects by raising funds from the tech industry, either through our
Industry Partnership Program, individual donations, or by reaching out to companies
that might be interested in co-sponsoring certain projects or organizations.
To read more about the structure of the grants program, evaluation criteria and more, please go through our grants thesis.
If you're a FOSS project or developer in need of financial support, please apply. For any questions, please reach out to us at events@fossunited.org (for Events) or grants@fossunited.org (for Projects) respectively.
Project Grants
Project grants are 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!
Recent Grants
FOSS training program for underprivileged communities
Webminal is a free, browser-based Linux terminal and learning platform running since 2011 on a single server with 8GB RAM. It provides real shell access (not a simulation) for students to learn Linux commands, system administration, and programming.
Surge is a high-performance, open-source download manager built for power users, combining multi-connection and multi-mirror acceleration, smart chunking, failover handling, resumable downloads, and live progress tracking for much faster and more reliable file transfers. It also offers a polished terminal UI, headless server mode, CLI automation, and browser extension support, making it easy to manage downloads interactively or integrate them into automated workflows.
Linux Diary 7.0 is an exciting event organized by the Walchand Linux Users' Group (WLUG) where we cover topics ranging from Basic to Advanced Linux and Networking. It is one of the most anticipated technology events at Walchand College of Engineering, Sangli, Linux Diary 7 .0 has consistently drawn a large audience, including students, faculty, and tech enthusiasts.
OSDHack’26 is a 5 day nationwide annual hackathon hosted by the Open Source Developers Community (OSDC). Previous iterations of OSDHack have seen around 500+ participants yearly. Theme: On Device AI This year’s theme invites participants to rethink how AI is built and used. The challenge is to create open-source projects where the core AI runs on-device, making applications faster, more private, offline-friendly, and less dependent on remote AI APIs.
PravConf brings together members of the Prav community, along with participants from the wider free software ecosystem, for two days of discussions, collaboration, and exchange. The event is expected to include: Community talks and sessions Discussions around privacy, self and community hosting, and the fediverse Contributor and developer interaction Space for planning future work and community initiatives Where? St. Thomas Institute for Science and Technology, Thiruvananthapuram (view in OsmApp, CoMaps, or OsmAnd)
Fellowship to support Pratham's work on SunPy, RADIS, NumPy, and a plethora of other projects across the open-source ecosystem
Follow-on fellowship grant of INR 6L to support contrapunctus’ work in the OSM ecosystem. Last year, contrapunctus travelled to events all over the country to host workshops, events and give talks.
Fellowship to support Aravinda’s work on Sanka and a plethora of other projects, mostly around FOSS Kannada tooling!