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Over the last few years I've talked with hundreds of people in the dev community, and almost everyone shared the same concern: there's no sustainable funding for critical OSS maintenance, and without it the modern world runs on an increasingly fragile foundation.

I have personal experience with university endowments, and at some point noticed that the open source world is remarkably similar to a top research university. They share the same reputation-based culture and functions — collaborative creation of IP as a public good, educating each other within thematic clusters, and commercializing only a small fraction of what they produce.

For universities, humanity has just two sustainable funding models: public spending or private endowments. Government support won't work for OSS at scale — it's too globally decentralized. And yet nobody had built an OSS-focused endowment before. After understanding why, I started building one together with other OSS folks.

Today we're publicly launching the Open Source Endowment — a community-driven endowment fund dedicated to sustainably funding maintainers of the most critical open source projects. All donations are invested in a low-risk portfolio, and only the investment income (~5%/year) is used for grants, making it independent of annual budgets and tech market volatility.

We recently received US 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charity status. The fund is at ~$700K, formed by 60+ founding donors — including founders of HashiCorp, Elastic, ClickHouse, Supabase, Vue.js, Pydantic, Nginx, Gatsby, n8n, and curl. Everyone is welcome to join them and participate in governance.

There's no perfect model for distributing OSS grants. Our approach: make it open, data-driven, measurable, and developed by people with skin in the game — donors. I tested this by personally donating $5K to 800+ Python projects in Dec 2024 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42312469). We're now looking to grow our donor community and together finalize the first model for grants in Q2 2026.

This is a pure community charity, and there are two things I'd love from HN:

1) Join as a donor — any amount — and help make OSE the most efficient long-term funding solution for OSS maintainers

2) Nominate OSS projects you think are critically underfunded on the Funding page at endowment.dev

I've been working on the same libre project for more than 25 years, and making a living from it for about 15, so I have my own perspective on this.

The biggest issue that I see is that even for things that are in some respects "finished", grants on the order of $5k do not change the maintainance picture very much at all. If there's a sudden crisis with critical infrastructure, people will step. But that's precisely what we want to move away from, and to do that the funding needs to be living-wage level, not single-issue grants.

It is awesome when those grants happen, and specific new features or compatibility are worked on. But the sustainability question is really not about that kind of work, for the most part. Somebody needs to actually be the guy in Nebraska and they need to consider that their role. Possibly it is just one role among a few, but it needs to be bigger than a one-and-done $5k-sized role.

The question is really how to redirect the streams of revenue that currently flow toward capital so that the people who work on OSS can do this as a living, not a part time calling. I don't see grants as a significant part of that.

Now the Open Source Endowment is a very small organization that starts with ~$5k microgrants. It is not enough for a living but still should help maintainers not only financially but also by allocating attention.

As it grows bigger, the grant size will also grow. One can help with this by donating and bringing in new donors!

$5000 is enough to make a living in several countries.

On a global scale, likely less than 10% of the world's population has ever been able to save $5,000 at any point in their life, with the vast majority concentrated in high-income countries. In low- and middle-income countries, this is a rare achievement limited to a small, affluent minority.

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I think my point is that grants may not be the way to get what is desired. Most people need predictable, long term income. You can get stuff done with grants, no doubt. But that's not the question - the question is can you build long term sustainable maintainance mechanisms for OSS. I hope you're right and I'm wrong.

A grant can be for a lot more than $5,000. It can be for as much as the grant-making org has and wants to spend. Grants can be given on an ongoing basis as well.

A stable/predictable base of maybe 50k USD/year is probably more in the range where it could influence someone to be FOSS maintainer full-time.

> Government support won't work for OSS at scale — it's too globally decentralized... We recently received US 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charity status.

If this is successful in the first iteration, I'd love to see a UK and EU based charities too. That would allow european donors to support on a gross pay basis, and may simplify grants to european nationals too. (I'm sure similar things apply in other jurisdictions too.)

Thanks, Alex. Ticketed here:

https://github.com/osendowment/foundation/issues/26

Will take some time ofc but good to plant the seed now. :)

OSE actually has it on its roadmap: https://github.com/osendowment/foundation/blob/main/roadmap....

Most likely we won't create our own subsidiaries, but will partner with local nonprofits (suggestions are welcome), which could make donations tax-deductible for UK/EU residents.

As for grants, we are totally fine with supporting European open source maintainers now. OSE has a global scope, limited only by the available payment infra and US regulations.

> will partner with local nonprofits

mmh. be very careful when choosing those. Esp. in former socialistic countries, and esp. in some of them (hint), where $$$ scheming has become bread-and-butter of the.. kind-of-former-but-new aparatchiks.. it's like an official mafia. Electrically speaking, they manage to find ways to ground and leech on any potential.. $100 or $100M alike.

otherwise - great initiative. The Commons (as of ivan ilich) need support and care in order to be .. there when needed.

Sure - we donate our own money to this endowment fund and carefully choose partners who have a solid reputation and can deliver maximum efficiency. I don't think we will have any of them in former socialist countries,except for those based in Berlin :)

There is already NLNet and other charities in the EU for funding FOSS.

How is this different than something like https://opencollective.com (which, for example, Actual Budget uses: https://opencollective.com/actual )

Open Collective (OC) is great! It's primarily a payments platform.

Open Source Collective (OSC, which is related to OC in convoluted ways I don't fully understand) is a fiscal sponsor of OSS projects, and is also great. :^)

Open Source Endowment (OSE), on the other hand, is a pile of money that earns interest that then gets distributed to OSS projects. So conceptually some projects either fiscally hosted by OSC or using OC as their payments platform could receive funds from OSE.

Does that help?

Edit to disclaim: I'm on the OSE board.

Open Collective (really Open Finance Consortium Inc.) is a US 501(c)(6) nonprofit that runs a payments and accounting platform, providing fund acceptance and budget services to a ton of different community collectives and funding groups, making it easier to connect funders with groups that are often not incorporated.

Open Source Collective is a separate 501(c)(6) organization that actively supports funders wanting to support FOSS projects or communities specifically. They share some board members, and they simply use Open Collective to do all the finance work, while also offering some level of advice and other IP holding services: https://docs.oscollective.org/welcome-and-introduction-to-os...

Open Source Endowment is different, in that it's soliciting 501(c)(3) donations, which the OSE board and membership will use for the endowment to choose FOSS projects/communities to provide grants for.

This topic should be a FAQ page on the OSE site, especially for funders who just want to donate "to some good FOSS" without knowing where to find it. When you donate to OSC, you pick specific collectives to give to (and it's not tax deductible). When you donate to OSE, you're giving to the endowment, that the OSE Members setup policies for how/where/when to provide grants to projects/communities (and it could be tax deductible).

Good on ya.

I work on a nonprofit platform that isn't "critical infrastructure," compared to a lot of stuff, so I'd likely not seek funding, in order to avoid stealing oxygen from the lone maintainer in Nebraska.

Just for the love of all things, do not let this become like Wikipedia or Mozilla. The moment you start paying for irrelevant things, you lose donors current and in the future. Nothing more frustrating than those two orgs in terms of where they spend their donor funds.

I am one of https://wikimediaendowment.org/benefactors (donated years ago), and now I am totally unhappy with what is happening with Wikipedia. It has been an important lesson learned.

To keep a nonprofit efficient and impactful, it is crucial for its governance to have skin in the game; otherwise, there will be no long-term alignment of interests. More details on why and how we implement this at the Open Source Endowment: https://kvinogradov.com/osendowment

As long time volunteer contributor in Mozilla (I am in the firefox credits and in the monument) it is very sad to say that I agree with you.

I have my opinion on why this is happening and my explanation is that in Mozilla they lost their memory because they act as a company and not as a foundation (they have both the identities). With the layoffs they removed a lot of people working there for years that knows a lot, they lost the historic memory and I remember a lot of discussion with employees that had no idea that there was a community or that they have no idea what is a GPL license. I mean in 2018 I remember reviewing this as part of the Mozilla Reps council, https://github.com/OpenTechStrategies/open-source-archetypes that was created to help the employee to understand OSS but I think that after the managers that created moved away it was just left as it is.

Sorry for the flame but I think that when a foundation act like a corporation there are issues.

What happened with Wikipedia? I thought they run a tight optimum ship?

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The FAQ, under "How can OSE evolve in the long term, especially in an AI-powered world?" appears to state a very pro-AI view.

I think this is hopelessly naive. The LLMs crapping out code are shamelessly ripping off open source code, sans copyright notice. It makes no sense for a foundation supporting open source to also support this massive copyright massacre.

Also, I think you're going to get flooded with requests to give money to vibe-coded crap, because if you have no skills or shame but want to make a little money off your AI-generated crap, why not try and extract money from this initiative? The curl guy showed this is very real.

The curl guy is one of OSE founding donors, together with the terraform guy who recently released an open source trust management system to help with AI-generated crap: https://github.com/mitchellh/vouch

I think that AI eventually will solve technical maintenance problems, but not human-related ones: limited attention, trust, motivation issues. And we are going to support mostly "old" projects everybody relies on, not some new AI-gen stuff.

Potential issues from new tech aside, an open-source endowment is a pro-social idea, that absolutely deserves its day.

Now, setting aside ethical issues for a moment, open-sourced knowledge, writing, history, data, Q&A, and tech is essentially a prerequisite for a data-driven technology like LLMs, and if those turn out to be a net win for humanity, then we can directly trace the routes to initiatives like this one that can curate humanity's best contributions.

> flooded with requests to give money to vibe-coded crap

And our plan is to willy-nilly give money to everyone who asks for it with no oversight or attention to other factors or human involvement. Game over. You win.

> It makes no sense for a foundation supporting open source to also support this massive copyright massacre.

Copyright is a fundamentally unethical concept and must die. Open source foundations should rightfully support the death of copyright, whether by LLMs or by other means.

Tax dollars to find software

So.... you just created a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization to offer grants for product development.

Yeah, this will end well.

Here are a couple salient portions of our IRS application to put your mind at ease. :^)

> In limited circumstances, the Foundation may make grants to organizations that are not described in IRC Section 501(c)(3), or to individual OSS developers, maintainers, researchers, and educators. These grants will support persons and organizations engaged in developing, maintaining, securing, documenting, or conducting research on free and open source software critical to public digital infrastructure.

> Any such grants will be made exclusively for charitable or educational purposes, with the Foundation retaining complete discretion and control over the use of funds consistent with Revenue Ruling 68-489.

[...]

> In addition to project-based grants, the Foundation will make recognition awards to individuals who have made extraordinary contributions to OSS serving as critical public digital infrastructure. These awards are analogous in structure and purpose to MacArthur Fellowships, the National Medal of Science, Pulitzer Prizes, and similar recognition programs administered by 501(c)(3) organizations.

Boldly asserting that all grants will be made exclusively for charitable or educational purposes does nothing to change the character of the grant. If you're giving money to someone for commercial product development then you're giving money to someone for commercial product development ... and if that constitutes the majority of what you do then you've got a major problem.

OSE won't give money for commercial product development - it is dedicated to supporting existing highly-used _nonprofit_ and independent OSS. Some specific examples are at https://endowment.dev/faq/#grants

As soon as you start paying individual maintainers, it stops being nonprofit OSS they work on. If you direct your funds to other charities, you're only shifting the tax issue to them. If you want to give money to maintainers with no strings attached, it's basically impossible to avoid double taxation.

clear and plain language on the website will do wonders compared to legal like comments with emoticons on HN

lets try something new

Putting capitalists in the middle doesn't seem new, more like another place they can extract a slice of the pie.

Let's back up: The way an endowment works is that donors donate money, which goes into a more-or-less permanent investment fund. The interest from the investment fund is then used to a) fund mission-aligned programs (in our case, OSS), b) stay ahead of inflation, and c) pay operating costs.

Where are you seeing capitalists "extract a slice of the pie" here?

The README on github

"pay operating costs" is one place non-profits often find fraud. Getting the money into the market between donors and builders, now you have to pay professional investors. You don't get to 7-8% returns without equities, what happens if the market tanks?

Why not build something super minimal that requires less management and operating costs? That doesn't have the market risk at the center of it all? That doesn't have more points for fraud and abuse?

> "pay operating costs" is one place non-profits often find fraud.

If you find it here please let us know.

Can you explain the 2-3% gap between expected returns and outlays? Seems like a lot more than what is needed for accounting (based on the other main person here posting)

The explanation is simple — nobody can predict exact annual returns, and they tend to fluctuate. We aim to spend at least 5% per year on OSS grants and need to decide if we can spend more on them or should reinvest based on specific annual results. And target earnings should overcome inflation.

Reasonable answer, but this part:

> Why not build something super minimal that requires less management and operating costs? That doesn't have the market risk at the center of it all? That doesn't have more points for fraud and abuse?

could still be usefully addressed.

The best long-term protection from fraud and abuse are aligned incentives through skin in the game. That’s why we legally require all people in governance to be Members ($1000+/year donation). This is an important topic, and here you can find more context on this: https://kvinogradov.com/osendowment/

I think this is really missing the point of the question. I know that it is common for endowments to be invested "in the market" - people believe that's the most responsible thing to do. But the question was about why do things the normal way? Why link up market performance of a set of investments with funding mechanisms for OSS? If you're going to be bold and try to fund something that is, in market and economic terms, quite off-norm, why do that using entirely normal systems that are at the core of a capitalist economy?

“super minimal that requires less management and operating costs” - that’s exactly our current setup, and always will be the target!

Now OSE has no paid employees - the team is 100% volunteers. Its Board Directors and the Executive Director are required to personally donate $1000+/year. Operating costs are close to zero.

As organization evolves there might be higher operating costs, but our commitment to keep them as low as possible.

700k from 60+ "founding donors" = an average of 11k per person.

These are people who have net worth values in the 10's to 100's of millions of dollars and they could only give ~10k to open source software?

My goodness we're cooked. The oligarchs are so unbelievably cheap.

OSE has a diverse community of donors, and most of them are not even close to that net worth level. Around 75% of our donors contributed in $1-200k range. We think that every donation matters, and hugely respect everybody supporting open source.

May I ask what it’s the right share of net worth one should donate to OSS? And what’s this share in your personal case?

So I know you're trying to shame my by pointing out my hypocrisy here, but I assure you that I wouldn't have made the original comment there if I didn't have a leg to stand on.

I am not a high net worth individual. With a 20 year career as an IC in the tech industry though, I'm quite comfortably middle class. But even I have donated $10k to charity in a single year many times. Many tech companies offer charity gift-matching programs. I take full advantage of those by having a donor advised fund so I can capture the full gift match amount every year and then disburse those funds as desired. When I was briefly at Microsoft, they had an oddly generous gift match of up to $15k per year. I literally put up $15k of my own money each year to capture that $30k/year into a charity account for several years.

That's why I feel like I can comment critically on this. I'm a regular dude who grew up dirt-poor and ended up modestly successful in life and even I can manage to donate amounts of 10's of thousands annually.

Compared to the much more successful executive, CEO, founder class who you mentioned were among your donors. To the kind who own houses in the Los Altos hills worth 10 million plus, those numbers seem kind of paltry.

I'm not trying to take away from the success of your organization and its mission. I congratulate you on your fundraising efforts and I know you can't afford to be critical of your donors lest those donors sour on you. But truly, it does strike me how some of the wealthiest among us, who have benefited the most from these common goods, can give so little.

Not everyone operate on same consideration regarding money. The mere fact to be able to donate something that is a significant portion of a median income salary is already the privilege of the most wealthy, so more than that this is the very limited realms of the winner take it all game of the casino or the casino owner. For this class of people, money has nothing to do with what it represents to most people. So there is no way people from these distinct classes can understand each other in term "share of net worth", because they are the same words that refer to completely different realities.

They didn't get there by being nice so by definition they're cutthroat tight wads

> founders of HashiCorp, Elastic, ClickHouse, Supabase, Vue.js, Pydantic, Nginx, Gatsby, n8n, and curl

By the sound of it, we can probably expect most of the stakeholders to be less interested in critical infrastructure or anything that solves real problems for actual human beings and more interested in the kind of frivolous devops make-work that creates more problems than it solves.

Kinda up to you. Recruit your friends to join if you want a say. :^)

> Individuals contributing at least $1,000/year to the endowment fund qualify as OSE Members. Members advise the OSE board on strategic matters, such as the grant-making model, and appoint community-nominated board directors. These rights are legally defined in our membership policy.

https://github.com/osendowment/foundation?tab=readme-ov-file...

$1000 to join the discussion table, wow, that's an extremely high bar. What is the motivation of such an excluding entry barrier?

It is a community-driven initiative - we encourage developers to join as donors and help to shape it. Also, our model from the very start is about deep layers of infrastructure: https://endowment.dev/endowment/#model.

Finally, I would not say that, let's say, founders of Nginx and curl are not interested in critical infra or don't understand it :)

If someone has money, why would they be better off joining this as a donor instead of just giving that money directly to someone who's actually doing good and necessary work? Everything about this seems like it will be a waste of whatever resources go into it. Like that one time Mozilla decided to help, through one of its grants, to secure $400,000 in funding for... the Webpack project.

> I would not say that, let's say, founders of Nginx and curl are not interested in critical infra or don't understand it

Congratulations, you managed to pick out the two projects in the set that makes it merely "mostly" (instead of "entirely") frivolous.

Something I’ve been curious about for a while is why more universities don’t get involved in sponsoring critical projects. In theory it could provide an interesting non-academic path for students and professors and, as you’ve pointed out, the funding model of the U would make sense here.

I’m curious… would you consider having a “faculty” of “tenured” maintainers who receive livable funding and support based on a history of significant contribution? I could imagine something like “named chairs” and professorships you see for some tenured folks in academia. This could be useful for key project leaders, and contributors. In addition, any kind of function to train and develop the next generation of maintainers?

This would very much make sense and generate direct real world products. However, I fear academia is in itself a very competitive space for resources that doesn't necessarily want to open up for outsiders.

Well universities have no qualms about making private relationships to help subsidize private research. Let's not worry about problems that don't exist or are trivially solved.

Can you give an example of what you mean?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/12/06/academi...

https://archive.ph/0MzkZ

https://www.wired.com/story/top-ai-researchers-financial-bac...

I live in Cambridge, MA there are dozens of these relationships going on; big tech offers lucrative access to cutting edge hardware in return for closed research.

Just more insidious ways on how big tech requires massive amounts of welfare to exist and persist.

I might be misreading, but at least the first article looks more like private companies subsidising public research, and not the other way round.

Ah yes, they totally subsidize public research with no strings attach. Right up there with cigarette companies subsidizing public health research. Or oil companies subsidizing public research. Or all the other various industries funding research that somehow always seems to agree with what they want, weird right?

Good lord. Why do you think these greedy entities that have devoted their entire lifespans fucking over consumers, competitors, nations, and children are suddenly having a change of heart and aren't enforcing their will upon researchers?

While that may have felt good to write, I'm not sure that it changes the fact that this sounds like private funding of public research, rather than as was stated, public funding of private research.

Your comment I was replying to, as an aide-mémoire:

> I live in Cambridge, MA there are dozens of these relationships going on; big tech offers lucrative access to cutting edge hardware in return for closed research.

> Just more insidious ways on how big tech requires massive amounts of welfare to exist and persist.

Your first sentence and second sentence don't reconcile in practice.

I love this. Reminds me of MacArthur Foundation's genius grants as well. Linux Foundation has fellows, but it's a small % of budget.

They do. Most big breakthrough software even today is made by university and national labs

Well, speaking in the case of the US, this would constitute product development which is well outside the scope of what a 501(c)(3) organization should be doing, which could thereby jeopardize their tax status? Or, in the case of a state-run university, this raises all kinds of issues regarding how tax money is being given away to random schmoes instead of benefitting the public at large.

So, yeah, there's plenty of reasons why they don't do that.

Open source wouldn't have a funding problem if people would stop being so averse to just paying for what they use. Maybe... the world should stop expecting something for nothing.

Using the model of the university and various tenured profs, I'm not sure what you are saying is true. But, perhaps it's a misunderstanding of what I was intending.

I see this more as a way to answer the question of things like the maintainers of OpenSSL or sudo. One approach is to fund the "project" and let it deal with all of these questions. Another approach would be to fund the people themselves. So, have a faculty of expert software maintainers, vetted by the governance structure of the OSE. Within that faculty, you could have "adjuncts" and "residents" who have a time-bound grant and set of obligations. If they are successful and their work continues to be relevant, they could eventually apply for one of a defined set of "tenured" positions. Those positions would guarantee them independence and a stable source of income in order to continue their role as a maintainer.

The goal of this "faculty" would be sustainable OSS maintenance (which involves both leadership and contribution), rather than publishing research and teaching classes. So, similar overall structure and approach, but differing goals.

> Using the model of the university and various tenured profs, I'm not sure what you are saying is true. But, perhaps it's a misunderstanding of what I was intending.

Tenured professors are not engaged in commercial product development.

> The goal of this "faculty" would be sustainable OSS maintenance (which involves both leadership and contribution), rather than publishing research and teaching classes.

OSS isn't commercial, per se.

Universities "ship" plenty of "products":

https://www.rcac.purdue.edu/services/hubzero

https://www.scala-lang.org/scala-core/

> Well, speaking in the case of the US, this would constitute product development which is well outside the scope of what a 501(c)(3) organization should be doing, which could thereby jeopardize their tax status?

Doesn't this apply only to for-profit products? There's plenty of 501c3's with free "products".

It is not about whether or not it is available for free, at cost, or otherwise, but whether or not the activity has the character of commercial product development. It's what the product is used for, not what price it's set at. A 501(c)(3) directly developing, or funding the development, of commercial software is not engaged in charitable, educational, or other exempt activities.

For reference: This is exactly what happened to the Yorba Foundation, and numerous others since then.[1]

[1] https://www.stradley.com/business-vantage-point-blog/irs-con...

There's clearly a change going on in the US government, and it very well may be that organizations such as Mozilla, FreeBSD, and Apache could all lose their 501(c)(3) tax exempt status in years to come.

At the end of the day though, 501(c)(3) status is a purely US concept, doesn't apply to international organizations internationally, and doesn't necessarily mean that you "can't" do what anyone is discussing here. It just means that folks gonna have to pay taxes and "donations" can't be written off on the taxes of donors.

Perhaps, at the end of the day, not pursuing tax-exemption/charity status is a more honest approach. It certainly doesn't precluding doing any of what has been discussed, it just changes the financial efficiency.

Which is why app stores and SaaS products thrive, they provide the mechanisms to actually pay for the software one uses.

It's an interesting idea. The current endowment size of less than $1M is immaterial; the question with a project like this will always be how it is able to raise capital.

A way something like this could be interesting is if founders started donating 5% of equity when they started a company to an open source foundation like this one.

It doesn't impact the founder much financially: Success is very binary for founders. But in aggregate, if thousands of startup founders do this, there would be some hits and some of those hits could generate a significant endowment.

(You can also try to get people to donate who feel their success was built on top of open source, but I feel that after 10 years building a company to IPO, one's attention as a founder has likely been on business metrics and spending time with business people, not on technology and spending time with technologists, and that shift in attention can reduce people's feeling of gratitude for the amazing inheritance that is open-source software).

Consider this as a nonprofit startup that has just raised a pre-seed round. The current size of $700K is indeed immaterial, as our plan is to scale it significantly in the coming years.

The closest real-world comparable to what we are building is the Wikimedia Endowment, whose former Director is among OSE’s advisors. Like Wikimedia, we aim to be supported not only by large donations but also by contributions from large community — in our case, 150M+ GitHub users.

Our target audience is diverse - from highly successful founders to everyday developers. The Open Source Endowment is prepared to accept donations in both cash and stock from these groups.

While 5% of equity may be too much, 1% seems achievable. I am personally ready to commit 1% of the carried interest from my own VC fund to the endowment.

What is a preseed round? You guys don't "make" money when the ROI is primarily about funding long term maintenance of open source projects.

"Preseed round" is just the small funding when the project is a very early stage. We expect to raise more funding when the endowment matures. There is no ROI, it is a pure charity.

Running a non-profit with the mentality of SV, what could go wrong?

Definitely something I will actively avoid after parent comment

Seems better like the current state...of there not being anything like that? Perfect is the enemy of good.

There are many existing projects like this, I'm not going to pick the one started by a former VC

Ask if those have not changed things, why would a VC run thing make things better? The last 2 decades have shown us what VC centeredness has brought us

Can you point out some existing ones with traction? I'm looking more at the list of people who are on board with it ("Trusted by open source creators" section) than who is actually running it, which I think is more important to get buy in than whoever is pulling admin strings in the back.

> Can you point out some existing ones with traction?

That's kind of the point, there are none. The question is why? If people cannot even click a button to support when it's right there...

I don't think people coming out of the VC world are going to fix it, call me cynical if you like

You said: "There are many existing projects like this", directly followed by "That's kind of the point, there are none." when asked for an example. Which one is it?

It's seems like a pretty thankless fundraising job but one where having connections to companies, banks and experience with distributing funds comes in handy. What's in it for a VC? I'd assume incoming deal flow and connections to new open source companies.

Seems more promising to me than a technical open source maintainer stepping up to do it on the side. But time will tell.

there are many existing, none with meaningful traction

it looks like there are no direct connections, they are investing, taking fees, and distributing the leftovers

Former VC!?

KV ... you gonna take that lying down? :P

> There are many existing projects like this

Also please link, we're not aware of any other endowments exclusively focused on Open Source.

Look at OP's profile: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=kvinogradov

https://runacap.com/

Not the former VC, but an active venture capitalist: https://kvinogradov.com. I earn money by investing in open source / AI / infra software startups, and I spend money by donating to nonprofit open source projects :-)

Also, it is not a VC who run things, but the team which consists of people with diverse backgrounds (founders/executives/devs x OSS/nonprofit) and the donor community (which everybody can join): https://endowment.dev/community/

It's the VC "class", similar to the Epstein Class, nowhere near as bad or vile, but have definitely been one of the primary reasons the wealth gap and inequality have risen and continue to rise

With your strong feelings against VC, I hope you are aware that HN is the message board of one of the leading VC firms?

> but have definitely been one of the primary reasons the wealth gap and inequality have risen and continue to rise

That's a pretty big leap you are doing there.

You can click my handle to see I've been a part of the HN community longer than yourself, I'm fully aware of the many associations

I have /rant'd on YC and the dilution of help to their startups after they stopped heeding their own advice to "do things that don't scale"

> I've been a part of the HN community longer than

Dang, got me beat, too. :) gg

It's not a competition, but it is faux pax for GGP to make the comment the way they did. I would hope you all would know that having been here more than a decade

What are your specific concerns?

By the way, only 1 out of 6 core team members is based in SV.

SV is not a geographical location in the sense I'm using it

Taking capital, using it, taking fees, and then distributing leftovers... sounds like Trumponomics

We all - the OSE donors - are donating personal savings to make this work, and are directly interested to make this org as efficient as possible. Having skin in the game is best way to keep such nonprofits accountable. There is no leftovers or fees - all investment income from donations goes to open source, except for minimized operating expenses (e.g. accounting). It is run by the team of volunteers without salaries, and we require $1000+/year donations from all directors of this org.

Are there rules on where you park the money between when you get it and when FOSS gets paid?

The README has a 2-3% gap between expected returns and outlays, surely that is not all going to accounting?

You have to give them at least some benefit of the doubt.

I have my own questions yet which I haven't materialized, about the bylaws and selection criteria. But at least they are proposing a new approach.

I'd at least give them a year tryout to see in what it materializes.

At the current state of things I'm a bit in doubts about the market, and how that will change across the year. Though, it would also be interesting, as an idea, to participate in such a process as a member.

Thanks for the idea, tabbott. Made a ticket to track:

https://github.com/osendowment/foundation/issues/24

I'm not an expert here on equity, 5% feels a bit high. I like the idea - even 1% would be significant. In general, could we start to hold accountable and start using public status and tracking of organizational commitment to the open source software they use and make profit off of - that might help a lot as well.

We in general are too naive and fail to hold accountable others and ourselves from contributing back when we use resources from the common public. Open source is like imo the common welfare/public resource. If others are abusing it, its time to call them out for what they are really doing: framing, abusing and stealing from the public and maybe we need to be more serious about this and change the public access (maybe hybrid-open source for companies who use OS software) and create systems to legally enforce these.

I'll put a plug for the Open Source Pledge here:

https://opensourcepledge.com/members/

The companies listed there have all paid at least $2000/eng on staff/year to OSS maintainers. Real accountability. Endowment accepts corporate donors but is primarily geared towards individuals at this point. Pledge members are all companies. Both/and ... to the OSS moon!

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Do I get this right that you can only nominate projects on Github? It should be known by now that a centralized platform like Github is the complete antithesis to open source.

We discussed this prior to launch, and obviously decided to launch as you see it. :) Our reasoning was that a) standardizing on GitHub URLs makes it easier to do automated analysis as part of the funding model, and b) any project important enough to matter will have at least a GitHub mirror. If you have counter-examples to (b), please comment them on GitHub (see what I did there?) or here and I will copy/paste for you. :)

https://github.com/osendowment/endowment.dev/issues/34

https://gotosocial.org/

Out of ethical disagreement they switched completely to codeberg. And they are certainly not the only ones, given signaling on the fediverse by other EU citizens.

They haven't pulled the plug on github yet, but my understanding is that Gentoo intends to drop it long term. In general, I would expect any of the projects that leave GH because they want to avoid being used to train AI would avoid leaving even a mirror behind (since that would defeat the point). (This is not intended as a value judgement, just saying that there exist projects that are doing this)

Thanks, noted at https://github.com/osendowment/endowment.dev/issues/34#issue...

> any project important enough to matter will have at least a GitHub mirror

That might be true, but many of the mirrors are unofficial.

Noted in the abstract, thanks. Concrete examples more useful ofc.

Concrete examples: GNU software, musl C library, everything from x.org and freedesktop.org. Just have a look at the top 1,000 projects from the Debian popularity contest and you'll find many projects outside the Github bubble. Why not use the Debian package name in your nomination form instead of a Github URL? Any project important enough to matter will have a Debian package, right?

If you're trying to come up with something like the "criticality score" based on repo metadata like the OpenSSF, you're likely to fail just like they did. Starting with Debian's popcon data makes a lot more sense, in my opinion.

Thanks, captured here: https://github.com/osendowment/endowment.dev/issues/34#issue...

I'd encourage you to look at the Software Heritage archive as an example of the broader diversity in software sources outside of GitHub. Even that doesn't cover everything, because many repos aren't yet archived there, and there are repo formats not yet supported, and code not in repos, and people that refuse/block archiving of their code.

Debian definitely doesn't package every piece of software that needs funding.

So what is your proposed solution?

Nominate any public git repo

(or at least Codeberg, SourceHut, etc.)

Why does it need to be Git? What’s wrong with Darcs, Pijul, Mercurial, Fossil, & so on?

Not the person you replied to, but I imagine less gameable signals than stars would make sense. Download count, default installs in multiple distros, industrial use cases in the cloud all come to mind.

Maybe giving money to the endowment gives you a vote? (Kills two birds with one stone.)

The details of how we're thinking about this are in:

https://github.com/osendowment/model

Happy to have you join us there to iterate on the model. We do prioritize input from paid-up members ofc. ;^)

> We aim to focus our support on the core of open-source ecosystems — like ~1% of packages accounting for 99% of downloads and dependencies

I guess this is core of plan and will not change?

Because I was thinking about projects like OpenStreetMap which are generating very useful data used by various open source projects, but are not by itself gathering very big pile of dependencies.

I guess that those would be out of scope.

(note: for OpenStreetMap itself I have gigantic conflict of interest, I received some OSM-related grants for software development)

> We do prioritize input from paid-up members ofc.

Pay-to-play, this reinforces the SV mindset underpinning all of this.

Strongly recommend you revise this if you are trying to present yourself as egalitarian. Feedback and suggestions for improvement ought to be considered on the merits, not who it came from, especially if money is the differentiator. (setting aside the natural reputation based weighting)

Considering what's happened with Tailwind, this seems to be a very useful initiative.

Plus, OS maintainers now have to deal with agents and vibe coders who can commit plausibly-looking code that doesn't actually do what it's supposed to, so the volume of work for them is only growing.

Agreed. Tailwind shows that a class of business models that were traditionally used to subsidize Open Source are vulnerable now that AI intermediates between downstream and upstream devs. It was always a tenuous funding arrangement, though, because it goes against the true economic grain of OSS as a "gift community." OSE aligns much more closely with the nature of OSS. I doubt we'll be able to help Tailwind in the short run, but hopefully we can address the problem at a deep enough level in the long run to avoid future Tailwinds (as it were).

The need to create this is the failure of tax based revenue model of the govt

It is great to see that governments are also funding open source, but I don't think it is sustainable and scalable because:

1) In every country, most politicians and citizens have no clue about the problem we are discussing here. Thus OSS won't have a meaningful share in the gov budget.

2) If an OSS-advanced country funds open source now (like Germany - kudos to them!), it might easily change later with a new administration (like the support of nuclear plants in Germany).

3) If a very stable OSS-advanced country perpetually support open source, that creates a freerider problem - nowadays it seems that German taxpayers are supporting OSS, but others do not and unlikely will.

Meanwhile, private funding is sustainable (endowment model) and scalable because of aligned incentives — people voluntarily join, not taxed.

Germany is making it work† but seems quite far off to say the least in the US. "Voluntary tax" like this is provocative in its own right, will be interesting to see what gets unlocked more broadly if this succeeds.

† https://www.sovereign.tech/programs/fund

UBI is the most likely outcome from Ai, then we can vote for raises... that'll be fun

Maybe a US VAT tax on the way there

Becomes all the more relevant after watching the latest Veritasium video on xz utils backdoor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoag03mSuXQ

Funny I was just commenting about something like this regarding Docker[0]. I feel like major corporations could and should adopt OSS projects in this manner especially critical software they all rely on, so that these projects don't have to worry about doing the most ridiculous of things to attain funding to keep themselves going. It's why I imagine Anthropic went ahead and just bought out Bun immediately, Bun was trying to monetize shortly before Anthropic bought them out, now they don't have to worry about that.

In a different world we would incentivize tech giants to sponsor critical open source projects by turning their donations into more serious tax write offs, up to a certain amount, and reviewed by experts within the industry, affiliated and unaffiliated with the companies doing the funding.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47154059

Here are more details on the story and thinking behind key features of the Open Source Endowment: https://kvinogradov.com/osendowment

This is an interesting idea. Why hasn't an established foundation like the Apache Foundation attempted something like this?

Possible answers: Maybe because the Apache Software Foundation spent over two years debating a feather versus a leaf? see https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/11/native_american_apach... Or because the Open Source Initiative wasted over a year debating election rules? https://lwn.net/Articles/1056376/ Or because the Document Foundation has been locked into a fight with its own members? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47157999 Looks like a pattern, doesn't it?

I think the "organizatton" should have membership fees. The members would get a somehow less restrictive license to the software maintained by the organization.

The organization needs a way to make something valuable it can charge a (membership) fee for, not just collect donations. Then it can share some of those fees with its developer-contributors, byt distributing a dividend that goes on to prepetuity instead of individual one-time grants.

So, two types of members, contributor-developers, and code-using organizations which get a less restrictive license.

This seems like a chicken-and-egg problem, but once it starts going it could be sustainable.

> 500+ OSS dependencies in an average app

insert Electron joke

edit:formatting

What kind of companies are the investments going to be parked in? Please be transparent about investment policy, targets, recipients and returns.

How are you planning on scaling this fund to the level it needs to be at? (probably many billions in payouts a year)

I'be been tracking oss funding efforts here https://oss.fund/

Nice! Missing https://opensourcepledge.com/ tho :)

This is for critical oss but how to fund non-critical oss?

Happy to support it. Well done Konstantin and the team

Great to see some positive stuff being created!

Inspirational stuff here Konstantin! Happy that I have the chance to take part in it!

Really cool initiative, excited to be part of it!

Glad we found some common ground together. ;^)

Really happy to see this initiative come to life

i just want the money how do i get it thx

I like the concept, I cannot donate today but I intend to do so in the future. I would definitely like to understand more about the distribution model, however.

Some day. :)

You can follow along w/ model development in this repo:

https://github.com/osendowment/model

Highly skeptical of undemocratic organizations whose founder immediately talks dismissively of government programs. Comments from OP aren't helping either.

Just another Silicon Valley bro that wants to be in-charge of something with zero democratic control. Very typical in the current environment, which is why it should be soundly rejected.

The project has involvement from people who have spent decades dedicated to these ideas — it doesn’t seem like a vanity project or a play for control. The most cynical view is that it is beneficial to the OP because it provides access to potential investments, which, sure, isn’t a pure philanthropic venture, but that seems a pretty small price to pay. The people involved are the people you would surely want running this project.

The thing is that our endowment is focused on the "old" non-commercializable OSS projects, while VC is about "new" and commercializable stuff. The irony here is that these two things in my life lie on opposite sides of the spectrum—both in scope and risk tolerance.

Our bylaws are pretty standard:

https://endowment.dev/docs/bylaws/

What part of them is "undemocratic" in your view?

One is a board that decides whether something they do is a conflict of interest or not.

Are you getting your ethics cues from SCOTUS?

Are you aware the kinds of language that are in the legal docs on GH, and what that enables?

There are strict regulatory rules for 501c3 nonprofits (for instance - no private benefits for nonprofit insiders) and guidelines on how to implement them, for instance, via CoI policy, which we have: https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/form-1023-purpose-...

Board members of a nonprofit are subject to external supervision, including auditing, regulators and—in extreme cases—lawsuits. The Supreme Court is unique because it is the court of last resort for the entire United States—even a state supreme court justice would be able to have their recusal decisions reviewed by a higher court, much less a random board member of a nonprofit.

What government programs in the US are stably funding open-source developers? I think most government-funded open source projects are very gunshy about looking for new funding because of the Trump administration completely politicizing grants and funding. I would not want to have to sign an anti-BDS pledge to get my open source project funded, and I would imagine that goes for many people in the community. Also, what "dismissive comments" are you referring to? The only one I saw was "Government support won't work for OSS at scale — it's too globally decentralized". Which is a fair criticism—open source projects are incredibly globalized, and getting e.g. New York State to fund an open source project that has contributors from Ukraine, India and China is a headache I don't think anyone would want to try and go through. There's just no benefit to the state administrators to fund that kind of project—they want to support parochial, home-grown projects with local ties.

Exactly! A few more considerations on gov support of OSS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47171562

In undemocratic organization wishes to fund my development of OpenStreetMap-related software I would gladly take money.

As long as it is not something outright evil like theoretical Gazprom Open Source Fund or something similar.

This is pretty amazing. Well, atleast the idea of it but I hope that its execution can stand the tide of time.

I remember being so frustrated with why people aren't using Open source that I created a Ask HN about it [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45558430] (Ask HN: Why are most people not interested in FOSS/OSS and can we change that)

The answer was a bit of chicken and egg problem. For end users, Open source feels second to good UI/UX but for developers who are severely underfunded, UI/UX isn't that much of a concern.

It was also a chicken and egg problem of funding itself, the above problem could've been solved if people could fund developers for better UI/UX or QOL features and then these services can be made better and people could use them de-facto and donate them further.

The issue at the time to me felt like as such, the biggest problem holding Open Source back was its lack of funding. This idea captured my mind so much so that I may or may not have a FOSS manifesto in one of my files after thinking about it for many many days ;)

This seems to be doing something new for Open source. I always preferred Nlnet in such situations but Nlnet is a single donation model whereas this is an endowment model.

I really appreciate the author for creating it as its truly something new for Open source and something which I do feel like is a worthy experiment and I wish this project success to have meaningful impact on the massive funding problem of Open source itself hopefully.

I actually thought of something here but for countries who have sovereign wealth funds, perhaps one can argue that a tiny backdrop of that amount driven into some project like this could do wonders for data sovereignity itself and prevent lock-ins of PSU's if say especially more funding could be given to all Microsoft alternatives as I see online that Microsoft is one of the worst offenders of lock-in for govt.s where If I remember correctly, there were definitely billions of dollars involved (iirc, I could be wrong tho)

I genuinely wish this project massive success for its future. I do think that there are some gotchas within this though (like how are you gonna give the money to contributors and get the money to the contributor who lives in nevada from the infamous xkcd) but I can only hope that given they have built this, they are passionate about the problems with open source and would figure out gotchas (I hope sooner than later)

Also if I may ask if you ever might need any volunteer for the project itself [I would prefer some minimal payment (just enough to pay rent haha) in the spirit of the project itself] then please reach out to me from mail when there might be such need.

Side note but I also believe that one of the ideas I wish to suggest if possible is a side-branch of the endowment which can help non-profits to move from their locked-in solutions to open source solution / self-hosted and have them donate some money instead of paying to the locked-in solutions, but rather paying to the endowment fund itself.

I think you can also combine this with some providers who might wish to donate their hardware resources as well for free (Hetzner/OVH and many other Lowendtalk providers) for perhaps some good-will/some more attention to their company in the cutthroat competition.

So this can help save real money from already non-profits who have important missions and save them money for their real causes rather than hardware costs/licenses/lock-ins and they could instead spend a tiny fraction of that money to fund the project itself which could fund Open source itself as well.

This can end up being a win-win situation in my opinion.

I may be a little too excited but I do see lots of potential.

If possible, I'd love to reach out to you regarding this to have hopefully a meaningful discussion about it.

TLDR: I have also created a excalidraw diagram to better explain what I mean by the last paragraphs.

Here's the link to it: https://gist.github.com/SerJaimeLannister/aad16377a48fe023ac...

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