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
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.
As it grows bigger, the grant size will also grow. One can help with this by donating and bringing in new donors!
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.
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.)
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.
https://github.com/osendowment/foundation/issues/26
Will take some time ofc but good to plant the seed now. :)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, this will end well.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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...
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 :)
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?
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.
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.
Doesn't this apply only to for-profit products? There's plenty of 501c3's with free "products".
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).
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.
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.
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!
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.
That might be true, but many of the mirrors are unofficial.
(or at least Codeberg, SourceHut, etc.)
Maybe giving money to the endowment gives you a vote? (Kills two birds with one stone.)
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.
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.
Maybe a US VAT tax on the way there
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.
insert Electron joke
edit:formatting
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.
You can follow along w/ model development in this repo:
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.
https://endowment.dev/docs/bylaws/
What part of them is "undemocratic" in your view?
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?
As long as it is not something outright evil like theoretical Gazprom Open Source Fund or something similar.
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...
