FOSS United Foundation

About

FOSS United Foundation is an Indian non-profit organization dedicated to promoting, strengthening, and fostering the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) ecosystem in India. Established in 2020, the foundation emerged as a joint collaboration between the technology teams at Zerodha, India's largest retail stockbroker, and Frappe, the publishers of ERPNext. FOSS United serves as the spiritual and structural successor to the ERPNext Foundation, which was founded earlier in 2016. The organization was built on the realization that while India possesses one of the largest software developer bases globally, its contributions to original, globally scaled open-source codebases remained disproportionately low. To address this gap and bring back a culture of experimental hacking and tinkering, FOSS United manages community initiatives, provides financial project grants, and hosts flagship technological events like the annual IndiaFOSS conference and the FOSS Hack hackathon. Under the leadership of prominent open-source advocates like Kailash Nadh and Rushabh Mehta, the foundation supports dozens of grassroots developer communities and actively advocates for open software policies in industry, academia, and governance across India.

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