FOSS United has announced a co-sponsored grant of ₹9,00,000 to Zasper, 50% of which is being sponsored by Zerodha.
Zasper, a tool developed by Hyderabad-based developer Prasun Anand, is an open source alternative to JupyterLab. Notably, JupyterLab is widely used by data scientists. AIM recently had an exclusive interaction with the creator and learned about his plans.
The IDE is designed from scratch to support massive concurrency. It aims to provide a minimal memory footprint, exceptional speed, and numerous concurrent connections. While it is currently available on macOS and Linux, the IDE intends to be a versatile, user-friendly, and cross-platform solution.
Jupyter notebooks are one example of the read–eval–print loop-style data applications that the IDE is geared for running.
With the grant amount, Zerodha and FOSS United have committed to financially supporting the creator’s development and improvement of the project full-time over the next six months. The focus will mostly be on improving the UX, platform support, documentation, performance, and creating advanced features and extensions.
Addressing the announcement, Anand said, “I am very grateful to FOSS United and its industry partners for creating the FOSS grants program. FOSS developers need more than GitHub stars and FOSS United grants solve that.” “I believe a lot of developers from India will gain from this program and more FOSS projects will come out from India,” he added.
On the same note, a number of exciting grant programs, such as Y Combinator’s Summer Fellow Grants, are emerging to encourage developers and entrepreneurs to use AI to build. With more joining the list, it should only get more exciting for developers and aspiring students.
