We don't require a membership to participate in GitHub discussions, but it is required to be invited to closed events and to be part of the OSE governance.

The global average salary of a software engineer is $5,906/month, and the OSE membership is $83/month ($1,000/year), so it would require donating ~1.4% of gross income. This aligns fully with the 1-2% of income that an average U.S. individual donates every year, and we are targeting more senior engineers, not the average ones.

So it is affordable for our target audience, but requires some personal commitment. To be efficient in the long term, an endowment must be managed by people who have skin in the game.

It would also be irresponsible to have people who can't or don't want to personally donate $1,000 to our cause, or people outside of the tech industry, managing a multi-million-dollar community fund focused on solving a pretty niche industry problem. Otherwise, the endowment ends up being as efficient as a typical government!