Zerodha announced $1M Fund for Open Source Projects

Zerodha is India's largest stock broker. In last decade, they have grown their user base and according to that they have scaled their technology to meet customer demands. They primarily use open source projects to build their products. Their tech stack includes PostgreSQL, Flutter, Java, Python, Go, React, Elastic search, Clickhouse. 

Zerodha also open sourced their projects and it is available in Github. Kailash Nadh is the CTO of Zerodha and he also open sourced his work. Zerodha is also a core member in FossUnited and also a sponsor in organizing annual open source tech conference. Their love and contribution towards open source is overwhelming. 

Few years back, we published an article why corporate should contribute to open source? There are lot of open source projects which are struggling to sustain as the maintainer is not getting enough grants. If the maintainer is not getting paid, then he/she will be eventually move to other paid jobs and the open source project will go unmaintained. Few open source projects are using open core model and releasing their project under source available license. Even though the project released under open source, it gives very less freedom for the end users.

To address this issue, few organizations like Github, Open Collective and others have started sponsoring the projects and they have provided a way to get sponsor from third party. In the same way, Zerodha also wants to contribute back to the open source community and started Floss Fund. They have announced $1M Fund for Open Source Projects, interested project owners can apply for the fund.

The grant will be $10,000 to $100,000 for a single recipient. Currently they plan to have a internal selection team to review the application and select the projects. In coming years, they plan to setup public selection committee. Applications that come through to the FLOSS/fund will be published on the portal, making them publicly discoverable by anyone interested in supporting projects.  

This is really a great move and appreciated. This is the need of the hour to sustain open source projects.