Open Source Endowment – new funding source for open source maintainers
endowment.dev187 points by kvinogradov 6 hours ago
187 points by kvinogradov 6 hours ago
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
> 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 :)
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
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.
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.
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.
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
clear and plain language on the website will do wonders compared to legal like comments with emoticons on HN
> 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...
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 :)
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://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 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":
> 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...
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.
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"