Maintainers Program Thesis [WIP]

Background

FOSS United Foundation is a non-profit organisation trying to strengthen the FOSS ecosystem in India. Our broad goals are -

• Supporting Individuals and Creators
• Nurturing FOSS Communities
• Enabling Organisations to meaningfully engage with FOSS

The foundation operates in three directions -

The global FOSS ecosystem rests on the shoulders of individuals. Behind almost every project that powers modern software infrastructure, there is a person or a small group of people who decided to build something and keep it alive. Foundations, Communities, Organisations and Companies all play important roles in the FOSS ecosystem, but the fundamental atomic unit of FOSS is the individuals who show up. After all, the foundations, communities and projects are all made of people.

This is why supporting these individuals is the foundation of our work. We have done a lot of brainstorming to determine how to name and frame this work, and have not been able to come up with the perfect word. "Developer" is too narrow, "Creator" excludes the people sustaining existing work, and "Contributor" is too broad.

The word “Maintainer” comes closest to what we mean. We define it loosely and deliberately, and explain why below.

Who is a Maintainer?

The word "maintainer" has a narrow technical origin. In software development, it traditionally refers to the person responsible for a codebase. However, the work of sustaining FOSS infrastructure extends well beyond code. Moreover, AI has made it extremely trivial to spin up a project. In an age where everyone can spin up their own alternative to a popular software, who is a “maintainer”?

For these reasons, we anchor this term not around artefacts, but an individual’s role in the ecosystem.

“A maintainer is anyone who takes ongoing responsibility for a FOSS or digital commons project. That could be writing code, reviewing contributions, managing releases, writing documentation, or stewarding the community around it. The project may be newly created or long-established. We do not define maintenance by the size of a project or the number of users, but the sustained, often unpaid labour that goes into keeping something useful alive.”

In practice, this includes -

• Creators of new FOSS projects
• Maintainers of existing FOSS projects
• Maintainers of upstream dependencies and infrastructure
• Individuals working on translations, localisation, accessibility, etc.
• Contributors to the digital commons ecosystem (open data, open science, etc.)

The problem

FOSS maintainers and projects face several challenges in their journey -

Disparate, non-trivial means of discovery - It is difficult to find adopters, contributors and users for a FOSS Project. Creators have to talk about their project across several channels ( HackerNews, blog posts, community groups, and Social Media platforms like Reddit, Linkedin, Twitter) to find eyeballs.

Lack of community - How does one find a peer group and a community for a niche that requires you to spend most of your time behind a screen?

Unpaid labor - Arguably, the most difficult challenge is to sustain yourself financially while working on a FOSS project. This happens because of several factors, but primarily because of the cultural expectation of FOSS work being free (as in free beer).

“Funding and financial sustainability, the lack thereof really, has been an increasingly hot topic over the last many years. Well, at least since cloud companies began making massive profits directly repackaging FOSS projects built by hobbyists and communities. The rise of the "open core" model and the unfortunate license changes in many good open projects recently, are clear signs of this growing turmoil. Many potential solutions seem to be emerging and evolving—commercial services, Venture Capital (VC) funding, and programs like GitHub Sponsors[↗], Open Collective[↗], FUTO[↗], Polar[↗], and Buy me a coffee[↗], amongst others. That said, Python libraries raising massive amounts of VC funding in quick time does not look like a healthy trend.”

• Kailash Nadh

We have tried looking at these problems from a theory of change lens

Maintainer Programs

Maintainer Programs is our initiative to support Indian FOSS project maintainers across the breadth of their entire journey, from getting discovered to becoming sustainable.

Premise

The foundation should treat its relationship with a maintainer not as a one-time interaction but as a long-term commitment to the health and sustainability of their project and their ability to keep working on it. The program is born out of our learnings from the grants program, and will subsume project and individual grant initiatives.

As part of the Maintainer Programs, a maintainer goes through the following stages.

Note that this is not exactly a funnel, and not every maintainer needs to be “supported”. Our goal, however, is to continue expanding this structure.

To give some numbers, we expect that

• There are 100s, if not thousands, of individuals doing great FOSS work in India who are unknown to the FOSS community.
• We have discovered around 200 of them just over the last year. Some of these individuals are listed on forklore.in
• We have supported around <50 people over the past 6 years.
• There are <10 sustainable projects in the FOSS United Community.

The program itself operates on a 3-layer model, each building on the previous.

• Discovery
• Community
• Support

If anything at all!

Our support towards FOSS projects has always been no-strings-attached. However, since the foundation operates on a limited amount of resources, we have to be very meaningful with where we direct them. The program should not be a unilateral transfer of resources.

The following are not requirements or conditions that you have to agree to when getting a grant, but some aspirations we have from Maintainers that benefit from our programs -

• Transparency and Visibility
  • We expect to have some visibility into the project and what the maintainer has been up to during the duration of the grant.
  • We will have periodic check-ins with Maintainers to discuss updates on the project, in addition to regular updates that they post on the forum.
• Community Engagement
  • Grantees are expected to participate in the community, with at least one meaningful interaction each quarter. This could be a speaking arrangement at an event, a blog post, or just a forum update.
  • Projects participating in Season of Commits or FOSSHack should engage actively with contributors who come through those programs
  • We highly encourage projects to participate in the multiple activities that happen at IndiaFOSS (talks, devrooms, booths).

• Reciprocity

  • As projects grow and become more sustainable, we hope they will find ways to give back to the ecosystem that supported them.
  • This could be through the FOSS pledge, mentoring newer projects, contributing directly to the Maintainer Programs, etc.

  Lastly, the FOSS ecosystem fundamentally operates on trust, and trust goes both ways. We hope that Maintainers (especially grantees) will consider any pointers we have for them, based on our experience from talking to tens of other Indian FOSS projects.

After a period of time, Maintainers in the support layer “graduate” from the program. We classify them as mature projects that have come out of the Indian FOSS ecosystem.

While such projects may not qualify for direct support hereon, they will be the stories that we champion. A maintainer doesn't need to have gone through all the layers, but we hope that this model helps bring more projects to the “sustainable” stage. Graduating from the program does not mean that you are leaving the ecosystem. You are still part of the maintainer program structure, but you “choose your orbit” and decide how you want to continue engaging with the foundation, for eg, becoming an active part of the community, engaging with our organisation program verticals like hiring.

Last year, we deployed more than INR 25L across 28 projects, fellowships, and events. We exhausted the grants pool entirely, running an estimated deficit of 2-3L by the end of the financial year. We received ~200 applications and approved fewer than 15%.

India's FOSS ecosystem is growing faster, and we need to expand the quantum of our support to keep up with this pace. For FY 26, we are raising INR 50 lakhs to fund more projects, expand fellowships, and launch the Maintainer Pack.

You can contribute to Maintainer Programs in two ways -

Grow the grants pool

Fund Indian FOSS maintainers directly, or co-sponsor specific programs like the Maintainer Travel Scholarships (5L), Season of Commits (75k per fellow) etc.

Contribute to the Maintainer Pack

If your company can offer cloud credits, tool licenses, hardware, training, or even space for co-working, we'd like to put it directly in the hands of Indian FOSS maintainers. This is a concrete, low-friction way to support the ecosystem.

Check out our partnership deck here.

A lot more Indians will be creating FOSS this decade. We want to help them navigate and sustain their journeys.

If you’re an organisation that wants to be part of this journey, or a Maintainer looking for support, please reach out.