About the program
The FOSSEE Summer Fellowship is run by FOSSEE at IIT Bombay, the centre that maintains the free and open-source software tooling the institute teaches with. Fellows work inside those tracks - Scilab, Python, Oxide and the surrounding documentation and packaging layers - against a brief set by the track maintainers rather than a project they propose themselves.
Selection is by screening task. Registration opens early in the year, a set of tasks follows, and the fellowship term is awarded from that shortlist. It is mentored and structured like a paid programme but carries no honorarium, which the card on this page states plainly rather than leaving to implication.
The 2026 cycle closed on 8 June. Application volume is the one figure FOSSEE publishes at scale - more than 4,500 applications were received for 2026 - so the shortlist is genuinely competitive even though the seat is unpaid.
Primary stack
Technical focus
The path
- 01Registration (early in the year)
Open a FOSSEE account and choose the tooling track you want to work in; eligibility is checked at this stage.
- 02Screening tasks
Each track sets its own exercises. They are the selection, so treat them like a take-home interview for that stack.
- 03Fellowship term
Accepted fellows work the track's issue backlog with a maintainer assigned, on the schedule the track publishes.
- 04Report and hand-off
Deliverables land in the track's own repository or documentation set, with a closing report to the mentors.
Who it's for
- Indian students who want a mentored summer inside a national FLOSS project
- Contributors interested in scientific-computing tooling, packaging and documentation rather than app frameworks
- Anyone building a mentored-program record before applying to a stipended season
What you walk away with
- Merged work inside IIT Bombay's open-source tooling, credited to the track
- A named mentor relationship with maintainers who run the project year round
- A completed mentored term to cite in later fellowship applications
- Depth in one scientific stack instead of a spread of small fixes
Program timeline
Calendar positions for the 2026 cycle - the marker shows October, where you are now.
- RegistrationMar - Apr
- Screening tasksApr - May
- FellowshipMay - Aug
Organizations
Reading the participation record...
More programs we track
Everything else on the calendar - 12 other mentored routes from first PR to paid season.
