Welcome to FOSS United’s September newsletter!
The festive season is sneaking up on us. Not close enough for a visit to your Masterjis, but close enough to dust off the Pinterest board. The rains are slowing down, the lights are on their way up, our calendars and (sick) leave applications are filling up faster than we’d like. Something about this time of year: people start making plans, homes get a deep clean, communities get together, and everyone suddenly has somewhere to be.
No wonder IndiaFOSS lands at the same time.
Because that’s what the digital commons are about. Coming together, sharing what we know and building things together. And of course, occasionally fixing something nobody remembers breaking. This month, we’re celebrating the people who make that possible. The reason FOSS United exists: you.
Highlights
IndiaFOSS schedule is live!
Yes, you heard it here first (or probably on the Telegram channel).
| Check out the schedule! → |
Also check out this very cool community-built unofficial companion app for the IF schedule here.
Day 0 and IndiaFOSS parallel
Workshops! The Day 0 workshops are live; this time there are 7 of them. Go grab your tickets! Remember, your IndiaFOSS pass does not cover the workshop tickets.
| Workshops? → |
Maintainer May! Needless to say, if you are a maintainer, you should be looking out for updates on the second edition of the Maintainer Summit, happening also on Day 0.
| Maintainer Summit returns → |
And finally, keep an eye out for IndiaFOSS parallel
Governing Board Elections 2026
Three seats of the FOSS United Governing Board are up for election this season. If you’ve been following along, the nominations have just concluded!
| Go check out the candidates → |
- As the campaigning phase begins, come join us on Sept 15th for a virtual Open House with the candidates. Ask them questions and help the community make an informed decision.
- The Open House continues at IndiaFOSS, with an in-person session on Day 1. See you in the room :)
Licence To Learn? 134 crores and counting
Soft-launching our latest, where we map out the software dependencies of public universities across the country. So far we’ve tracked NITs, IIMs, IIITs and AIIMs - about 71 institutions so far.
What do you think Indian academia spends the most on? How willing they are when it comes to responding to RTIs?
| Go find out → |
Also read TheHindu’s coverage of Licence to Learn.
Community
Events
- In-person MumbaiFOSS 2026 | Oct 31
- In-person WikiConference India 2026 Kochi | Sept 4-6
- In-person Youth IGF India 2026 Mumbai | Sept 4
- In-person OpenSpeaks workshop, Kochi | Sept 7
- Virtual Open House | GB Elections 2026 | Sept 15
- In-person September FOSS Meetup, Chennai | Sept 19
- In-person Open House 2 | GB Elections @IndiaFOSS | 12:15 PM, Sept 26
- In-person Maintainers Summit, Samagata Foundation, Bengaluru | Sept 25
- In-person Workshops @ IndiaFOSS 2026, NIMHANS Convention Center, Bengaluru| Sept 25
- In-person IndiaFOSS 2026, NIMHANS Convention Center, Bengaluru| Sept 26-27
- Mixed IndiaFOSS Parallel
To view other upcoming and past FOSS events, please visit the FOSS Events Timeline.
Grants and opportunities
- Beyond the Net Grant Program | October 1
- Sustainable Peering Infrastructure Grant Program | Invite only
- GECKO/fund | Rolling Basis
- Open Source Endowment | Rolling Basis
- FOSS United Grants | Rolling Basis
- FLOSS/fund | Rolling Basis
News
- Over 134 crore spent on proprietary software at premier institutes, says open source collective /The Hindu
- Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs / Codeberg
- Nvidia is buying Hugging Face for almost $13 billion / The Verge
- Researchers notes from the AI data centre in Vizag / DEF India
- Registry of Type Design
- Was Oracle right in banning AI contributions for OpenJDK / AIM
- Over 170k Nonprofits Lost All Their Data, is Microsoft to Blame? / HN
- Should ChatGPT read your encrypted messages? / Internet Exchange
- Meta Owes The Rest Of The World It’s Teen Protections / Tech Policy Press
- Rumour is the exploit
- Bruno: The Funding Announcement We Never Made
- The Biases And Blinkers Of Big Tech’s Language Models / BehanBox
- Revenge Of The Nerds / The Baffler
- Archiving the Present, a network for South Asia’s oral knowledge launches in Kochi before WikiConference India
Projects
- Ragz - self-hosted agentic RAG platform
- Reactive Resume - A free and open-source resume builder
- OffPay - pay anyone without internet
- Timeline Studio — local-first AI video editor that runs in the browser
Want to showcase your project? Post it on the forum, and we’ll include it in our next edition!
Housekeeping @FOSS United
Forklore
Here’s who joined the lore last month, projects worth bookmarking, and the maintainers behind them worth knowing:
- Vikramaditya Narayan, creator of OWASP Precogly
- Priyanshu Jain and Sanderling
- And finally, check out Murtaza Aliakbar’s Notes from a Maintainer
Grant updates
- Check out the updates from FU’s Grants program. Follow the bi-weekly thread.
- Read: Arya’s notes on his experience with the YLAC PAP fellowship and Venkatesh’s experience attending COSCUP x UbuCon Asia 2026
Monthly Tech Report
Check out FOSS United Platform’s Tech Report for August
