Foss United

FOSS United Foundation is a registered non-profit founded in 2020, dedicated to the cause of building Free and Open Source (FOSS) projects and communities in India and elsewhere. It originally started out as the ERP Next foundation in 2016 with the same broad goals. Its new avatar is a joint collaboration between the teams at Frappe, the publisher of ERPNext, one of the largest FOSS projects out of India, and Zerodha, India's largest stockbroker and a fintech company. The foundation, currently in its infancy, aims to provide grassroots support to FOSS projects and events and invite industry patronage to support FOSS, in India. India is now a hub of startups, innovative consumer software, developer communities, and largescale technological infrastructure. However, somewhere along the lines, the spirit of FOSS and hacking seems to have been overshadowed. This is illustrated by the disproportionately low number of quality FOSS projects coming out of India given a thriving industry compared to the explosion of projects that have happened globally over the last decade. In the Indian context, our goals are: To promote the spirit of hacking, tinkering, and writing code, not only for profit but for fun. To build quality FOSS for the public good. To build quality free software that specifically empowers people with tools to run their livelihoods and power the economy.