8 ms·

Open Source Endowment – new funding source for open source maintainers

256 points by kvinogradov 7mo ago

kvinogradov 7mo 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 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
- bombcar 7mo ago
  How is this different than something like https://opencollective.com https://opencollective.com (which, for example, Actual Budget uses: https://opencollective.com/actual https://opencollective.com/actual )
  - whit537 7mo ago
    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.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 7mo ago
      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.
    - ShaneCurcuru 7mo ago
      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-osc/our-services-and-benefits 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).
vicamelnikova 7mo ago
Really happy to see this initiative come to life
ymolodtsov 7mo ago
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.
- whit537 7mo ago
  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).
kchumachkov 7mo ago
Happy to support it. Well done Konstantin and the team
jstarrnotringo 7mo ago
[dead]
janober 7mo ago
Really cool initiative, excited to be part of it!
- whit537 7mo ago
  Glad we found some common ground together. ;^)
talboren 7mo ago
Inspirational stuff here Konstantin! Happy that I have the chance to take part in it!
nazgulsenpai 7mo ago
> 500+ OSS dependencies in an average app insert Electron joke edit:formatting
nwellnhof 7mo ago
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.
- briffle 7mo ago
  So what is your proposed solution?
  - hedora 7mo ago
    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.)
    - whit537 7mo ago
      The details of how we're thinking about this are in: https://github.com/osendowment/model 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. ;^)
      - verdverm 7mo ago
        > 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)
      - matkoniecz 7mo ago
        > 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)
tabbott 7mo ago
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).
- mannanj 7mo ago
  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.
  - whit537 7mo ago
    I'll put a plug for the Open Source Pledge here: https://opensourcepledge.com/members/ 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!
dvh 7mo ago
This is for critical oss but how to fund non-critical oss?
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
numbsafari 7mo ago
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?
- whit537 7mo ago
  I love this. Reminds me of MacArthur Foundation's genius grants as well. Linux Foundation has fellows, but it's a small % of budget.
- mentalgear 7mo ago
  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.
  - shimman 7mo ago
    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.
    - philipallstar 7mo ago
      Can you give an example of what you mean?
      - shimman 7mo ago
        https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/12/06/academic-research-meta-google-university-influence/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/12/06/academi... https://archive.ph/0MzkZ https://archive.ph/0MzkZ https://www.wired.com/story/top-ai-researchers-financial-backing-big-tech/ 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.
yoyohello13 7mo ago
Great to see some positive stuff being created!
shimman 7mo ago
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.
- whit537 7mo ago
  Our bylaws are pretty standard: https://endowment.dev/docs/bylaws/ https://endowment.dev/docs/bylaws/ What part of them is "undemocratic" in your view?
  - verdverm 7mo ago
    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?
    - nightpool 7mo ago
      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.
    - kvinogradov 7mo ago
      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-of-conflict-of-interest-policy https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/form-1023-purpose-...
- 3rodents 7mo ago
  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.
trueismywork 7mo ago
The need to create this is the failure of tax based revenue model of the govt
- verdverm 7mo ago
  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
- whit537 7mo ago
  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 https://www.sovereign.tech/programs/fund
- kvinogradov 7mo ago
  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.
giancarlostoro 7mo ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47154059
kvinogradov 7mo ago
Here are more details on the story and thinking behind key features of the Open Source Endowment: https://kvinogradov.com/osendowment https://kvinogradov.com/osendowment
tristor 7mo ago
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.
- whit537 7mo ago
  Some day. :) You can follow along w/ model development in this repo: https://github.com/osendowment/model https://github.com/osendowment/model
beanjuiceII 7mo ago
i just want the money how do i get it thx
NedF 7mo ago
[dead]
bibryam 7mo ago
I'be been tracking oss funding efforts here https://oss.fund/ https://oss.fund/
- whit537 7mo ago
  Nice! Missing https://opensourcepledge.com/ https://opensourcepledge.com/ tho :)
Seattle3503 7mo ago
This is an interesting idea. Why hasn't an established foundation like the Apache Foundation attempted something like this?
- randoramax 7mo ago
  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_apache_software_foundation/ 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/ 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47157999 Looks like a pattern, doesn't it?
Imustaskforhelp 7mo ago
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 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/aad16377a48fe023ac89c8569c0e6508?permalink_comment_id=6004805#gistcomment-6004805 https://gist.github.com/SerJaimeLannister/aad16377a48fe023ac...
vismit2000 7mo ago
Becomes all the more relevant after watching the latest Veritasium video on xz utils backdoor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoag03mSuXQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoag03mSuXQ
pabs3 7mo ago
How are you planning on scaling this fund to the level it needs to be at? (probably many billions in payouts a year)
pabs3 7mo ago
What kind of companies are the investments going to be parked in? Please be transparent about investment policy, targets, recipients and returns.
galaxyLogic 7mo ago
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.
lofaszvanitt 7mo ago
Still the same power and control structure. Ridiculous. Work for free repackaged.

256 points by kvinogradov 7mo 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 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

bombcar 7mo ago
How is this different than something like https://opencollective.com https://opencollective.com (which, for example, Actual Budget uses: https://opencollective.com/actual https://opencollective.com/actual )
- whit537 7mo ago
  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.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 7mo ago
    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.
  - ShaneCurcuru 7mo ago
    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-osc/our-services-and-benefits 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).

vicamelnikova 7mo ago

Really happy to see this initiative come to life

ymolodtsov 7mo ago

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.

whit537 7mo ago
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).

kchumachkov 7mo ago

Happy to support it. Well done Konstantin and the team

jstarrnotringo 7mo ago

[dead]

janober 7mo ago

Really cool initiative, excited to be part of it!

whit537 7mo ago
Glad we found some common ground together. ;^)

talboren 7mo ago

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

nazgulsenpai 7mo ago

> 500+ OSS dependencies in an average app insert Electron joke edit:formatting

nwellnhof 7mo ago

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.

briffle 7mo ago
So what is your proposed solution?
- hedora 7mo ago
  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.)
  - whit537 7mo ago
    The details of how we're thinking about this are in: https://github.com/osendowment/model 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. ;^)
    - verdverm 7mo ago
      > 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)
    - matkoniecz 7mo ago
      > 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)

tabbott 7mo ago

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).

mannanj 7mo ago
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.
- whit537 7mo ago
  I'll put a plug for the Open Source Pledge here: https://opensourcepledge.com/members/ 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!

dvh 7mo ago

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

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]

numbsafari 7mo ago

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?

whit537 7mo ago
I love this. Reminds me of MacArthur Foundation's genius grants as well. Linux Foundation has fellows, but it's a small % of budget.
mentalgear 7mo ago
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.
- shimman 7mo ago
  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.
  - philipallstar 7mo ago
    Can you give an example of what you mean?
    - shimman 7mo ago
      https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/12/06/academic-research-meta-google-university-influence/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/12/06/academi... https://archive.ph/0MzkZ https://archive.ph/0MzkZ https://www.wired.com/story/top-ai-researchers-financial-backing-big-tech/ 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.

yoyohello13 7mo ago

Great to see some positive stuff being created!

shimman 7mo ago

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.

whit537 7mo ago
Our bylaws are pretty standard: https://endowment.dev/docs/bylaws/ https://endowment.dev/docs/bylaws/ What part of them is "undemocratic" in your view?
- verdverm 7mo ago
  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?
  - nightpool 7mo ago
    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.
  - kvinogradov 7mo ago
    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-of-conflict-of-interest-policy https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/form-1023-purpose-...
3rodents 7mo ago
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.

trueismywork 7mo ago

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

verdverm 7mo ago
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
whit537 7mo ago
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 https://www.sovereign.tech/programs/fund
kvinogradov 7mo ago
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.

giancarlostoro 7mo ago

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

kvinogradov 7mo ago

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

tristor 7mo ago

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.

whit537 7mo ago
Some day. :) You can follow along w/ model development in this repo: https://github.com/osendowment/model https://github.com/osendowment/model

beanjuiceII 7mo ago

i just want the money how do i get it thx

NedF 7mo ago

[dead]

bibryam 7mo ago

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

whit537 7mo ago
Nice! Missing https://opensourcepledge.com/ https://opensourcepledge.com/ tho :)

Seattle3503 7mo ago

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

randoramax 7mo ago
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_apache_software_foundation/ 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/ 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47157999 Looks like a pattern, doesn't it?

Imustaskforhelp 7mo ago

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 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/aad16377a48fe023ac89c8569c0e6508?permalink_comment_id=6004805#gistcomment-6004805 https://gist.github.com/SerJaimeLannister/aad16377a48fe023ac...

vismit2000 7mo ago

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

pabs3 7mo ago

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

pabs3 7mo ago

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

galaxyLogic 7mo ago

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.

lofaszvanitt 7mo ago

Still the same power and control structure. Ridiculous. Work for free repackaged.