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
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.
As long time volunteer contributor in Mozilla (I am in the firefox credits and in the monument) it is very sad to say that I agree with you.
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've been working on the same libre project for more than 25 years, and making a living from it for about 15, so I have my own perspective on this.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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] (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 b...
35 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 75.0 ms ] threadI 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
insert Electron joke
edit:formatting
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).
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?
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.
As long as it is not something outright evil like theoretical Gazprom Open Source Fund or something similar.
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.
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
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 b...