Greetings!

Welcome to FOSS United’s February Newsletter. While we are still trying to come to terms with the fact that 2026 is here, January has already slipped away in a flash, that is, unless you are BADBADNOTGOOD. But more importantly, headlines first, we have dates for IndiaFOSS 2026, yes, you heard it right. Week of Sept 26-27th. SAVE THE DATE!

Now, highlights:

• It is FOSS Hack time of the year

  • FOSS Hack is back for its 6th edition! Have you registered??
    
    Register Now!
    
    Same same but different different.

• Instead of a hectic weekend sprint, this time, the hackathon will run through the month of March, an attempt at sustaining momentum, patience and making meaningful contributions.

• It takes a village… to sustain the FOSS ecosystem, and a whole lot of them never open a code editor. This time FOSS Hack is accepting non-code contributions too :)
  
  

• FOSS United at FOSDEM 2026

  • FOSDEM 2026 concluded last week in Brussels. This time, we supported a handful of Indian FOSS projects to show up and represent the FU community and FLOSS/fund at our booth @FOSDEM.

  • Among the projects that we supported were: Ente, Zasper and Rethink DNS. They were joined by Nemo and folks from Mecha Systems at the booth.

  • Follow this thread for FOSDEM updates :)

    

• 2025: A year in grants @FU

  • I’ve always felt January is just admin. The real New Year kicks in around February. On that note, check out FOSS United’s recap of Grants through 2025 and a small window into how 2026 might turn out to be. Read

  • https://fossunited.org/blog/grants/2025-grants-recap

• Tech-Policy Fellowships through FOSS United [ New ]

  • We’ve always believed that code doesn’t exist in a vacuum, nor should people who write it! Over the last few years, we’ve run a scholarship for FOSS technologists to pursue the GCPP Tech-Policy course at the Takshashila.

  • In addition to this, starting 2026, we’ll also be offering scholarships for community members who want to pursue the Policy in Action program offered by Young Leaders for Active Citizenship. Check it out, APPLY!
    
    

Upcoming Events

• FOSS meetup Prayagraj | Virtual | Feb 03

• BangPypers x SciPy India – Feb Python Meetup | Bangalore | Feb 21

• FOSS Activity Mangalore | Feb 28

• FOSS meetup Bangalore | March 01

• AI Impact Summit | New Delhi | Feb 16 onwards

• The Encryption Equation | Virtual | Feb 04

• Governing Digital Thirst | Virtual | Feb 23

• Tech Impact and Policy Center’s Winter Seminars | Virtual

• Future of the Commons Talks |

To view other upcoming and past FOSS events, please visit the FOSS Events Timeline.

Community corner

• Jobs and Grants

  • FOSS United Grants | Rolling Basis

  • FLOSS/fund | Rolling Basis

  • Nagarathna Memorial Grant | Deadline: March 15

  • NGI Fediversity | Deadline: April 01

  • NGI Zero Commons Fund | Deadline: April 1

• News

  • 25 years of Wikipedia

  • Reframing Impact: AI Summit 2026 | AI Now Institute

  • Code is cheap. Show me the talk. - nadh.in

  • Science Is Drowning in AI Slop - The Atlantic | Ross Andersen

  • Owners, not renters: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

  • Top 50 Open Source Conferences in 2026 | OSI

  • Open Modular Linux Handheld Computer by Mecha Systems Inc | Kickstarter

  • In a world run by AI, the early-career professionals stand to lose the most | The Indian Express | Sai Rahul Poruri

  • Succession: Linux kernel community gets continuity plan for post-Linus era

  • Brussels plots open source push to pry Europe off Big Tech | The Register

  • Synthetic Media in Elections and Politics in India | Prateek Waghre

  • The Grok Disaster Isn't An Anomaly. It Follows Warnings That Were Ignored.

  • When I signed up to make deliveries on Zomato, Blinkit and Swiggy for a day | Long Reads News - The Indian Express

  • Why experts say AI tool to detect Bangladeshis will be open to misuse | Tabassum Barnagarwala

  • Cloud outages 2025: how global businesses survived blackouts - Rest of World | Damilare Dosunmu

  • Data & Society | Turning the Tide: Climate Action In and Against Tech

• Project Showcase

  • An open source ledger for news stories that shouldn’t expire

  • Reas - a simple, lightweight, free reference list manager

  • Halfsies - An expense splitter in your browser

  • A minimal, interactive license generator that fetches licenses from GitHub’s official API.

Want to showcase your project? Post it on the forum, and we’ll include it in our next edition!

FU Housekeeping

• Forklore

Here’s who joined the lore last month, projects worth bookmarking, and the maintainers behind them worth knowing:

• AltSendme and Tony Antony

• Shubham Kumar and Twig

• Ankur Ankan with pgmpy
  
  Know someone who should be here? Let us know!
  
  

• Monthly Tech Report

Check out FOSS United Platform’s Monthly Tech report for January 2026!

Have thoughts on the newsletter? Reach out to us at team@fossunited.org

"May the FOSS be with you" 🚀

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