The second tranche and anniversary reflection

TLDR; FLOSS/fund completes its first year and finishes allocating $1 million to FOSS projects globally.

This week marks the first anniversary of FLOSS/fund. We launched it last year out of Zerodha as a big experiment to fund critical Free/Libre Open Source projects globally, which in turn was the culmination of a series of ad-hoc funding attempts over the years. It is the first of its kind in India, and one of the few in the world. Our experience has far exceeded our expectations in many ways, while also disappointing us in a few unsurprising ones.

But, before we get into all that, here's the most important bit of the update, the second tranche.

Tranche 2 of 2025

We are happy to announce the second and final tranche of 2025, totaling $675,000. Along with the $325,000 from the first tranche, this brings the total to $1 million for the year. All projects and tranches can be tracked here.

We will be reaching out to all recipients in the coming days to initiate the due processes and formalities.

As is evident, there is significant diversity in these projects, which range from developer tools and consumer apps, programming languages and libraries to critical FOSS infrastructure to humanitarian and social-impact work. This diversity, although great, has nuances and intricacies which makes the running of a non-thematic, open-ended fund for FOSS projects tricky.

I would like to think that "congratulating" the recipients here is inappropriate, as for them, this is neither a victory, nor an achievement. FOSS projects that the world depends on ought to receive financial backing as the norm. At the very least, a significant amount of collective societal gratitude and recognition is owed to FOSS maintainers and communities. For-profit orgs that benefit from FOSS though, give more money than gratitude, will ya!

As for us, we are very happy to be able to play a small role in the continued development and maintenance of critical FOSS projects. Personally, I'm extremely chuffed, excited, and moved by the fact that we are able to do this.

Mutual Assured Sustenance (MAS)

Speaking of critical FOSS projects, much has changed in the last few months geopolitically. Among many other things, conversations around tech sovereignty have been thrust to the forefront—something that is practically impossible without FOSS. It feels like, for the first ever time, funding and sustaining FOSS projects globally is becoming a sovereign priority at the nation-state level. Let us hope (and work towards) that not backfiring!

Unlike international trade relations—which can be abruptly halted through legal action—FOSS collaboration is abstract and driven by entirely different motivations and incentives. A significant majority of FOSS is produced and maintained by people who do it because they want to, isolated from political and state-level priorities and incentives. And yet, it is their creation that underpins the global digital infrastructure with far-reaching consequences. I would even go so far as to think that it must be far easier for a country to procure critical goods via alternate supply chains than to create their own robust Postgres, Blender, or Firefox from scratch. It is undoubtedly simpler for a reasonably well-off country to set up mega-structures like skyscrapers, than to create, sustain, and scale their own Linux kernel alternative. I mean, what languages, compilers, and libraries would be used in such an endeavour? What about interoperability, compatibility, and adoption? Actually, forget all that, what about entire ecosystems and universes that would need to exist to enable any of that (like Carl Sagan once famously asked).

Actually, no amount of material resources can enable governments to develop, nurture, and sustain complex, high-quality FOSS projects themselves in the way a community of passionate maintainers can. The incentives, DNA, and motivations simply do not align. Realistically, it is not possible for the idea of tech sovereignty to be rooted in "owning" and creating all technology, especially software, from scratch. There is no way but to participate in the collaborative global FOSS ecosystem.

That is, Mutual Assured Sustenance (MAS)—the very opposite of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). While MAD is a strategy of rational deterrence for global "stability", MAS is a system that enables global cooperation, where checks and balances naturally emerge from the fundamental tenets of FOSS. It results in collaboration, mutual interest, mutual benefit, and mutually reinforcing dependencies that are pretty damn hard to break. Without it, no country can have a meaningful technology or digital ecosystem.

The FOSS ecosystem, despite its flaws and nuances, is one of those rare instances where technology, social movements, reciprocity, idealism, ideologies, passion, creativity, communities, individuals, corporations, governments, and industries end up interacting (and sometimes even directly collaborating) out of mutual interest, even when their motives differ. From an academic perspective, it would be interesting to examine this through the sociological lens of Star and Griesemer's boundary object—a shared construct around which diverse groups and actors interact and collaborate with differing motivations, deriving varying degrees of utility and impact.

FLOSS/fund is Indian, but its purview is global. This is a MAS construct.

Anyway, back to the matter at hand.

Looking back

What has been great

• Some of the biggest and most important FOSS projects in the world have applied to the fund. To name a few, Blender, OpenSSL, OSM, FFmpeg, Krita, and Python Software Foundation among many others.
• There is great diversity in projects. We have everything from developer tools, programming languages and libraries, critical FOSS infrastructure, to humanitarian and social-impact projects.
• There is great diversity in entities—individuals, communities, non-profits, for-profits.
• Applications have come via word of mouth and volunteer outreach from within FOSS communities, despite no campaigns, advertisements, or even social media presence.
• The funding.json experiment has done really well.

What has not been great

• After announcing the fund in October 2024, there have been two tranches. The first one in the 7th month (May 2025), and the second in the 12th (October 2025). We were hoping to do quarterly tranches, but the applications have been too sporadic to have any sort of regular cadence. This is okay and should improve over time.
• Of the $325,000 announced in May 2025, we have only been able to disburse $195,000 so far, owing to logistical, process, and paperwork delays. That means, with the second tranche announced in this post, within 12 months, we have only disbursed $195,000 out of $1 million. This will carry well into next year, creating significant operational overhead.
• For every recipient, from the time of announcement to disbursal of funds, it has taken anywhere between four to sixteen weeks. This has almost entirely to do with cross-jurisdictional paperwork (tax, ID, incorporation, and other legal formalities).

Looking ahead

GitHub Sponsors

A number of recipients in the first tranche have opted to wait and receive payments via the GitHub Sponsors platform rather than go through the paperwork hassle to receive funds directly, which is understandable. I suspect several recipients in the second tranche will also prefer this route.

We have been working on establishing a formal partnership with GitHub Sponsors to enable projects to choose it as a channel for getting paid. This has been a very difficult endeavor, thanks to complex cross-border financial regulations, and of course, the peculiarities of the Indian system. The teams at GitHub Sponsors and on our side have been patiently and diligently working on this for almost a year—a mammoth project involving lawyers, bankers, finance folks, auditors, and of course, FOSS hackers. The single biggest mail thread in my inbox right now is this mail chain. However, we are finally at the stage of seeking regulatory approval and are hopeful it will come through, making disbursals exponentially easier for recipients who prefer GitHub. A special thank you to the GitHub team for the patience!

Also, an important goal here is to establish clear regulatory precedent and create a template for other Indian organisations to partner with platforms like GitHub to fund FOSS projects easily. Without this, it is outright infeasible for organisations interested in funding FOSS to navigate the Kafkaesque maze of laws and regulations.

funding.json manifest

How the funding.json open schema has fared has been particularly exciting to me. The issues it aims to address, and the motivations and experiences that culminated in its creation, have been problems I've mulled over for a long time. They are described in detail in the original announcement.

To apply to FLOSS/fund, an entity must publish a publicly accessible funding.json on their website. So, its presence in projects that applied to FLOSS/fund cannot be construed as adoption or be attributed to schema's merits directly. However, there are other interesting indicators:

• There has been a positive, natural acceptance of funding.json as the means of applying to FLOSS/fund. We've received very few (angry) e-mails asking for a web form, and that's a pretty big achievement in the FOSS world ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
• Entities both large and small have thoughtfully presented their broad financial requirements aimed at the general public in their funding.json, rather than just publishing nameake entries specifically aimed at FLOSS/fund. This ranges from $5 monthly individual donations to $500K corporate payments to solicitation of funds via support contracts. This is precisely the goal of the manifest. We do not want FLOSS or the fund to have any form of exclusivity; instead, we want to encourage projects to publicly share their financial requirements with the world.. Two examples: openstreetmap.org/funding.json and ziglang.org/funding.json.
• In reality, there is no "applying" to FLOSS/fund. A project publishes its funding requirements as a public, machine-readable manifest and adds it to the FLOSS/fund open directory. The fund reviews public listings and makes its selections periodically. There is no other "application" process or status tracking. Anyone anywhere, and not just FLOSS/fund, can browse the open directory and pick projects to support. I'm positive that more tooling around these manifests will emerge, like this live analysis of the open directory.
• The manifest makes FOSS funding, grant applications, and financial solicitation portable. Write and publish once, apply anywhere. Unlike applications for awards or one-off events, funding requirements of FOSS projects are recurring, long-standing, and inherently public. The idea of an open JSON manifest captures these dynamics. Imagine a project applying to NLNet, the German Sovereign Tech Fund, FLOSS/fund, and several others without having to craft entirely new grant applications. The EU already has Europass for portable, machine-readable CVs for jobseekers. funding.json is basically that, but for FOSS projects. Informal conversations I have had about funding.json's adoption in other contexts has been good validation.
• GitHub is evaluating adding support for recognising and rendering funding.json committed in repositories. Fingers crossed!

Idea: Indian Sovereign FOSS Fund

Unless one was hibernating in permafrost, one could not have missed the serious geopolitical changes the world has undergone in recent months. Tech sovereignty has become a critical national agenda, and without FOSS, such a vision is practically impossible.

The Government of India's IndiaAI Mission is spending taxpayer money to support the creation of open-source LLMs. It has also been a strong advocate of Digital Public Goods (DPG) and Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) on the global stage, both of which are deeply intertwined with FOSS. Tangentially, while DPI and DPG are conceptually nice, the way these terms have been widely diluted and openwashed is extremely frustrating. In reality, FOSS is the true engine behind any meaningful manifestation of DPI and DPG. The Linux kernel, Wikipedia, and OpenStreetMap are perhaps the best examples for the ultimate global public goods that fundamentally reshaped the world through true openness and collaboration, way before these terms were even coined.

Coming back, the Government of India is strategically pro-FOSS. Everything from large government systems to much of the new-age tech industry is built on FOSS. Given the focus on tech sovereignty, now feels like the most opportune moment to establish a sovereign FOSS fund—a move of direct strategic national importance. It would be a win for FOSS ecosystem, the state, the government, and the industry, both of which are massive beneficiaries of FOSS. Apart from the German Sovereign Tech Fund, NLNet (which receives funds from EU and governments), and NSF, few countries have done this. A well thoughtout setup where the fund is administered by the FOSS community in collaboration with the government, could position India as one of the global pioneers of MAS in the modern technology landscape.

We, as members of both the Indian tech industry and the FOSS community, intend to urge the Government of India to explore the idea and advocate for its adoption.

Lessons

Non-thematic is difficult

FLOSS/fund is not a thematic fund, which makes selecting projects hard. Each project has to be viewed in its own context rather than compared to others. For instance, how does one compare a decades-old, widely used project, with a new experimental one that holds great promise, but uncertain success? Similarly, how does one weigh a developer tool or a library against a humanitarian project that directly impacts lives? They must all be viewed through their own lenses, and that's pretty damn hard under the umbrella of a fund. Some projects are critical technical infrastructure; others are critical societal infrastructure.

These are a few of the (very subjective) questions we've framed for evaluating projects. It seems to be a fair reflection of FLOSS/fund's worldview:

• Is the project critical technical FOSS infrastructure or a foundational building block?
• Is the project widely used? Does it have alternatives? If yes, how does it compare to them?
• Is the project one of many in a crowded space? What makes it special?
• Is it the only FOSS effort of its kind? The only FOSS alternative to a proprietary system?
• Is it a dependency that cannot be swapped out easily? Is its continued existence critical?
• It is a niche project, but within that niche, how important is it? And how important is that niche overall?
• It is a very domain-specific project like scientific computing. How important is it within the domain?
• Is the project an institutional, community, or individual effort?
• Is it R&D that may become important to the FOSS ecosystem tomorrow?
• If it's a consumer application, what is the demographic of its userbase? Individuals, just businesses, or a wide range of diverse users?
• Beyond being standalone technology, does it serve as a means for social impact? How significant is that impact?
• Does the project already receive funding? Does it have significant industry backing? Does it have a surplus or a deficit? If it is a deficit, how bad is it?

Answers to these questions cannot be found in a silo and requires perspective and broad understanding, sometimes beyond FOSS. That's where community comes in. Needless to say, at this point, it seems logical to create categories at least, if not themes, for better organisation and evaluation.

Community participation is crucial

FOSS United Foundation has been an invaluable and active ecosystem partner. Volunteers from the FOSS United community have extended support not just in outreach and communications, but in evaluation and execution. Through this diverse network, we've spoken to users, contributors, participants of various projects, experts from various domains, to help with evaluation and decision-making. Even with just ~300 applications in the first year, it's clear that without community support, it's going to be hard to administer an initiative like FLOSS/fund—imagine a sovereign fund!

While it is common sense that the evaluation of diverse projects requires inputs from a diverse community with experience and expertise, it is still a useful, universal insight for anyone setting up similar initiatives. There's a formal proposal under consideration at FOSS United Foundation to create a structured, community-voting–based selection process for future tranches.

Lack of fiscal clarity in projects

This is a pretty interesting one. A number of basic assumptions that we think are common knowledge, in reality, are not. Here are a few scenarios we've encountered, which can only be addressed with clear governance structures around projects. I think these are also pretty valuable insights for similar initiatives being set up elsewhere.

• Imagine a project maintained by, say, three developers, who put in varying levels of effort. Which individual receives the funds? How do the funds get split? Can the disbursement be split into three different sub-entities? It is infeasible for an entity like FLOSS/fund to handle these matters. Internal affairs must be sorted out at the recipient's end before soliciting funding.
• Imagine a foundation that oversees the technical governance and administration of a project where contributions come from a diverse community. A few contributors are significant and recurring, but not official members of the foundation. The foundation has no financial requirements and does not want to act as a fiscal host that raises and distributes funds to contributors. There is no explicit charter that permits contributors to solicit funds on behalf of the project (though informally the foundation may be fine with it). Can the contributors now solicit funds on behalf of the project? How does a funder like FLOSS/fund verify this? FOSS organisations must have clear guidelines and governance mechanisms addressing such ambiguities at their end, enabling contributors to solicit funding.
• Similarly, an organisation that manages the development and maintenance of a project, raising funds and paying official maintainers, does not have a clearly defined framework for community contributions. If an unofficial contributor is making significant code contributions, can they solicit funds on the project's behalf? How can that be reconciled with the project itself officially raising funds? This also requires clear guidelines.
• For-profit entities maintaining FOSS projects face another question: should they book business income through consulting and service contracts, or explore other means? The laws and regulatory frameworks vary across jurisdictions.
• There is, unsurprisingly, significant US-centricity in the understanding of cross-border payments and transactions. While it's impossible to fully grasp the insane complexities of global financial frameworks and tax codes, we were surprised by how many organisations and fiscal hosts expressed surprise at this basic fact. As the FOSS funding ecosystem expands worldwide (and it must), a better understanding of these nuances will help projects achieve better global placement. FOSS is global. FOSS funding must also be global.
• In the same vein, complex tax treaties between different countries are a reality. There may be tax deducted at source, which can be claimed by filing tax returns in the recipient's country. Recipients, especially organisations, must not be surprised and must be prepared to handle such scenarios.
• It takes up to three months for an entity in the US to receive the tax-residency letter from the IRS after an online application (!). FOSS projects and organisations in the US raising funds globally ought to keep this document handy.

The biggest lesson of all is the continued reaffirmation that many super-big, super-critical projects that we assume are doing okay, are so under-funded and under-resourced, it is scary. The reality is that the criticality and extent of usage of a FOSS project often has no positive correlation with its health or sustainability. xkcd #2347 depicts this beautifully (and scientifically).

What's next?

Obviously (and most importantly), continue hacking and contributing to FOSS and the global commons. As for FLOSS/fund for its year two:

• Allocate a fresh $1 million for 2026 and look for projects to support in the open directory listings. "Applications" are perpetual, so all listings in the open directory are re-evaluated periodically.
• Create a community-based project evaluation and selection mechanism.
• Push harder to reduce the logistical and process delays, and obtain regulatory precedent for making processes smoother.
• Set up tech tooling to make the backend operations easier—a support ticketing system and a document collection CRM.
• Explore partnerships with global platforms (like GitHub) that make disbursements simpler.
• Explore corporate outreach for encouraging companies to set up similar funds.
• Advocate for the setting up of a sovereign FOSS fund in India.
• Increase FOSS community outreach to encourage projects to publish funding.json manifests so as to not just add them to FLOSS/fund's evaluation pool, but to publicise their financial requirements in general.

If you're a FOSS project, do "apply".

So long!

PS: 100% of the emdashes in this post are human-generated