Free as in free banana: a clickbait blog about IndiaFOSS 2025

This blog was supposed to be published in October 2025, but was delayed by 5 months due to reasons I’m too embarrassed to disclose. – perry

IndiaFOSS, the annual conference for free and open source software, had its fifth edition in September this year. Thousands flock to the event every year, including software freedom activists, knowledge commons contributors, tinkerers, NGOs and college students. This time pre-events and devrooms complemented the usual bunch of talks, BoFs and booths. This was my second IndiaFOSS, and I was excited AF (not the fake LinkedIn excitement) to meet people from FSCI and other free software and knowledge commons communities.

Murphy’s law, an epigram popular in hacker communities, states that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. I had planned to arrive one day in advance with urbec, a Debian Developer I met some months ago, and have fun. Murphy’s law ensured that our day ended up being a disaster from the moment we arrived. We took a metro to the wrong station and had to walk an hour to our hotel room without having breakfast. The hotel receptionist, a custodian of the Great Indian Culture™, did not relish the thought of us staying in the same room and eloquently asked us to book two separate rooms or find another hotel. We had paid for a room in advance but why argue when we can rant online and defame them like civilised people. Having skipped breakfast and lunch, we had to settle for a room at an expensive hotel nearby. My service provider, which prides itself in giving fast internet at the peak of Ponmudi Viewpoint, did not bother to provide more than one bar of signal at the metro city. Luckily badrihippo was in Bangalore that day. We met and found a place to eat, where I got enough signal to post my rant. Ansh from FOSS United saw the rant and volunteered to help find a better hotel, and later even told me they’d remove the hotel from the IndiaFOSS travel guide. Unfortunately, Murphy had the rest of the disaster planned by then – badrihippo’s footwear broke, the food was too spicy, and heavy rains appeared out of nowhere. We finally got a bus back to the hotel, but the bus took off before urbec could depart, and we had to run in the rain to find each other again. Gah.

The fun began with the pre-events on Friday, which were scattered across different places in Bangalore. I could only attend an accessibility workshop at RV University and a small part of the maintainer summit at Samagatha Foundation and Takshashila Institution, which also happened to be my first unconference. Everything in the unconference looked interesting and it was difficult to choose where to go. Some people were talking about burnout, funding and sustainability, and we got to hear firsthand from OSS and free software devs how funding affects their motivation to continue building software. It is ironic that big tech relies entirely on software made by software freedom activists in their free time while the latter still struggle to make ends meet. Initiatives such as the FOSS Pledge, FLOSS/fund, NLnet’s NGI Zero and the Open Source Pledge have brought together some companies, organisations and governments that contribute back to the commons, but the biggest players in the tech industry contribute just a few seconds of their income to the projects they rely on.

This cartoon has seen many derivatives in lots of ways, such as this one. Source: XKCD 2347: Dependency. Licensed under CC BY-NC 2.5.

IndiaFOSS officially began on Saturday morning at NIMHANS Convention Centre and having reached early I could feel the chatter of participants gradually increasing. IndiaFOSS is a low waste event, and the emphasis given to decrease waste is admirable. Me and Varun spent the morning helping Prav with their community booth and got to talk with some people new to FOSS. I roamed around for some time and missed some good talks. Nemo’s talk on LibreFin, the world’s first FOSS UPI app, had the hall packed, and badrihippo showcased his encrypted XMPP app Convo on a Nokia flip phone with KaiOS. There were some interesting talks from the community but some of the talks were too corporate and seeing the AI is inevitable argument felt out of place in a community run event.

Talks are only a section of IndiaFOSS. The booths are the most crowded places at IndiaFOSS and the event hosted 60 booths this year. Communities such as MUKTI, ILUG Bangalore and FOSSASIA drew quite a crowd from students, and Inkscape and KDE showcased their latest software. I got to meet contrapunctus, disaster2life and NLBRT, all of whom I only knew before from XMPP groups and the fediverse, for the first time IRL at the OpenStreetMap booth. NGOs too have their share at the booths. SFLC.in had a booth selling goodies and merch. They are quite popular among the FOSS community in Kerala, and were involved in the Kerala HC case that eventually led to the HC declaring internet access as a fundamental right. People from Indic Archive were roaming around nearby, and Wikimedians of Kerala gave flyers for everyone. Tattle showcased their multiplayer game Viral Spiral, which is under the AGPL. Yay for copyleft. The community booths were diverse in many ways, and the organisers have managed to avoid open washing. Some people were discussing source available and open core licensing. There was a potluck with free food, a play on the term free as in freedom, not free beer. Naturally, I missed it. Anyways I found an actual human with Brad Sucks’ songs in their playlist. Many conversations and debates later, day one had come to an end. Debian users at the conf organised a dinner at JP Nagar and we had fun afterwards roaming around the city at night. zzz.

Sunday was the last day, and I spent most of the morning roaming around at the booths, having random conversations around caste and universal basic income, and at the open data devroom. It is amazing how much we can understand from openly available data, and the things people have researched and built are a testament to it. Diagram Chasing made a data article on how people in Bangalore use the metro with the data from a single RTI reply and a film censorship database from crowdsourced data. Data for India regularly publishes insights on data from government agencies. Constitutional Observer documents how questions and debates in the Constituent Assembly affect our life. Where does hate live shows reported instances of hate speech and disinformation in an interactive map. Conversations with disaster2life and others about privacy violations and enshittification later came in handy for a talk on consentful tech at CDF’s Good Tech Campaign.

While IndiaFOSS 2025 might seem like an insignificant two-day event to an outsider, it is one of the few remaining events in India where hackers can meetup and express themselves without facing backlash. Planning for the event started way back in November 2024. FOSS United has ensured the diversity of attendees, something even local communities have been unable to do, with many meetups having only privileged abled neurotypical cishetallo men. Childcare support, accessibility support, diversity scholarships and the quiet room show how much care the organisers, volunteers and the community have put towards inclusion and making people feel seen and valued. Everything at IndiaFOSS, from the planning and sponsorship part to the actual event, were documented openly, and as badrihippo put it, the organisers, like a well-chosen font, were fading unobtrusively in the background, yet instantly recognisable. Attending IndiaFOSS was overwhelming (in a good way :) and fun, but I feel like it should be a weeklong event (LibreWeek, anyone?). Three days isn’t really enough to get to know everyone. I miss the fun we had and hope to see everyone again. <<sad BGM>> Bye for now.

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