kvinogradov

4 ms·

1.
by kvinogradov 7mo ago
We explicitly explained to the IRS that our endowment plans to make awards and grants to individual OSS developers and maintainers in the US and other eligible countries. Given our limited target scope — not just any software, but critical
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by kvinogradov 7mo ago
The endowment model is complementary to direct donations, which many of OSE donors make. For example, I did this a lot: https://kvinogradov.com/algo-sponsors . Some people do this privately, and the largest public case among
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by kvinogradov 7mo ago
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
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by kvinogradov 7mo ago
It can be a recurring grant if a target OSS project continues to be highly valuable, but risky. When it loses value or is derisked (e.g. by extra funding), then grant priority will naturally move to another project.
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by kvinogradov 7mo ago
Thanks for sharing the context, it's really helpful. For full transparency, I am not a high-net-worth individual either, and I also grew up dirt-poor and now am a modestly successful 34-year-old tech dude. We are not building yet anoth
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by kvinogradov 7mo ago
There are areas where we experiment and take risks: raising the first-ever endowment for open source, making it very lean and digital-first, relying on bottom-up funding and governance instead of large corporate donors, etc. But all other a
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by kvinogradov 7mo ago
Software has its own lifecycle, and the funding should not stick indefinitely to a specific project. Meanwhile, our grant format might evolve into some type of limited tenured positions for maintainers, which support the most critical yet r
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by kvinogradov 7mo ago
The best long-term protection from fraud and abuse are aligned incentives through skin in the game. That’s why we legally require all people in governance to be Members ($1000+/year donation). This is an important topic, and here you c
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by kvinogradov 7mo ago
“super minimal that requires less management and operating costs” - that’s exactly our current setup, and always will be the target! Now OSE has no paid employees - the team is 100% volunteers. Its Board Directors and the Executive Director
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by kvinogradov 7mo ago
Now the Open Source Endowment is a very small organization that starts with ~$5k microgrants. It is not enough for a living but still should help maintainers not only financially but also by allocating attention. As it grows bigger, the gra
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by kvinogradov 7mo ago
OSE has a diverse community of donors, and most of them are not even close to that net worth level. Around 75% of our donors contributed in $1-200k range. We think that every donation matters, and hugely respect everybody supporting open so
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by kvinogradov 7mo ago
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 b
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by kvinogradov 7mo ago
Exactly! A few more considerations on gov support of OSS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47171562
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by kvinogradov 7mo ago
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
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by kvinogradov 7mo ago
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
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by kvinogradov 7mo ago
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 impa
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by 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
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by kvinogradov 7mo ago
Here are more details on the story and thinking behind key features of the Open Source Endowment: https://kvinogradov.com/osendowment
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by 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/cha
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by kvinogradov 7mo ago
The thing is that our endowment is focused on the "old" non-commercializable OSS projects, while VC is about "new" and commercializable stuff. The irony here is that these two things in my life lie on opposite sides of t
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by kvinogradov 7mo ago
We all - the OSE donors - are donating personal savings to make this work, and are directly interested to make this org as efficient as possible. Having skin in the game is best way to keep such nonprofits accountable. There is no leftovers
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by kvinogradov 7mo ago
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 (suggesti
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by kvinogradov 7mo ago
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 :-)
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by kvinogradov 7mo ago
What are your specific concerns? By the way, only 1 out of 6 core team members is based in SV.
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by kvinogradov 7mo ago
"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.
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by kvinogradov 7mo ago
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 A
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by kvinogradov 7mo ago
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 build
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by kvinogradov 7mo ago
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 .
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Open Source Endowment – new funding source for open source maintainers(endowment.dev)
256 points by kvinogradov 7mo ago|167 comments
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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

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