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?
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.
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
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.
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.
The FAQ, under "How can OSE evolve in the long term, especially in an AI-powered world?" appears to state a very pro-AI view.
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.
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 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.
Potential issues from new tech aside, an open-source endowment is a pro-social idea, that absolutely deserves its day.
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.
> flooded with requests to give money to vibe-coded crap
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.
Let's back up: The way an endowment works is that donors donate money, which goes into a more-or-less permanent investment fund. The interest from the investment fund is then used to a) fund mission-aligned programs (in our case, OSS), b) stay ahead of inflation, and c) pay operating costs.
Where are you seeing capitalists "extract a slice of the pie" here?
> founders of HashiCorp, Elastic, ClickHouse, Supabase, Vue.js, Pydantic, Nginx, Gatsby, n8n, and curl
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.
Kinda up to you. Recruit your friends to join if you want a say. :^)
> 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.
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.
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 :)
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).
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 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.
"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.
There are many existing projects like this, I'm not going to pick the one started by a former VC
Ask if those have not changed things, why would a VC run thing make things better? The last 2 decades have shown us what VC centeredness has brought us
Can you point out some existing ones with traction? I'm looking more at the list of people who are on board with it ("Trusted by open source creators" section) than who is actually running it, which I think is more important to get buy in than whoever is pulling admin strings in the back.
You said: "There are many existing projects like this", directly followed by "That's kind of the point, there are none." when asked for an example. Which one is it?
It's seems like a pretty thankless fundraising job but one where having connections to companies, banks and experience with distributing funds comes in handy. What's in it for a VC? I'd assume incoming deal flow and connections to new open source companies.
Seems more promising to me than a technical open source maintainer stepping up to do it on the side. But time will tell.
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 :-)
Also, it is not a VC who run things, but the team which consists of people with diverse backgrounds (founders/executives/devs x OSS/nonprofit) and the donor community (which everybody can join): https://endowment.dev/community/
It's the VC "class", similar to the Epstein Class, nowhere near as bad or vile, but have definitely been one of the primary reasons the wealth gap and inequality have risen and continue to rise
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.
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!
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.
We discussed this prior to launch, and obviously decided to launch as you see it. :) Our reasoning was that a) standardizing on GitHub URLs makes it easier to do automated analysis as part of the funding model, and b) any project important enough to matter will have at least a GitHub mirror. If you have counter-examples to (b), please comment them on GitHub (see what I did there?) or here and I will copy/paste for you. :)
They haven't pulled the plug on github yet, but my understanding is that Gentoo intends to drop it long term. In general, I would expect any of the projects that leave GH because they want to avoid being used to train AI would avoid leaving even a mirror behind (since that would defeat the point). (This is not intended as a value judgement, just saying that there exist projects that are doing this)
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.)
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.
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).
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?
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.
I love this. Reminds me of MacArthur Foundation's genius grants as well. Linux Foundation has fellows, but it's a small % of budget.
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
How is this different than something like https://opencollective.com (which, for example, Actual Budget uses: https://opencollective.com/actual )
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.
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.
The FAQ, under "How can OSE evolve in the long term, especially in an AI-powered world?" appears to state a very pro-AI view.
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.
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 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.
Potential issues from new tech aside, an open-source endowment is a pro-social idea, that absolutely deserves its day.
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.
> flooded with requests to give money to vibe-coded crap
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.
lets try something new
Putting capitalists in the middle doesn't seem new, more like another place they can extract a slice of the pie.
Let's back up: The way an endowment works is that donors donate money, which goes into a more-or-less permanent investment fund. The interest from the investment fund is then used to a) fund mission-aligned programs (in our case, OSS), b) stay ahead of inflation, and c) pay operating costs.
Where are you seeing capitalists "extract a slice of the pie" here?
The README on github
> founders of HashiCorp, Elastic, ClickHouse, Supabase, Vue.js, Pydantic, Nginx, Gatsby, n8n, and curl
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.
Kinda up to you. Recruit your friends to join if you want a say. :^)
> 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...
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.
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 :)
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).
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 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.
What is a preseed round? You guys don't "make" money when the ROI is primarily about funding long term maintenance of open source projects.
"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.
Running a non-profit with the mentality of SV, what could go wrong?
Definitely something I will actively avoid after parent comment
What are your specific concerns?
By the way, only 1 out of 6 core team members is based in SV.
SV is not a geographical location in the sense I'm using it
Taking capital, using it, taking fees, and then distributing leftovers... sounds like Trumponomics
Seems better like the current state...of there not being anything like that? Perfect is the enemy of good.
There are many existing projects like this, I'm not going to pick the one started by a former VC
Ask if those have not changed things, why would a VC run thing make things better? The last 2 decades have shown us what VC centeredness has brought us
Can you point out some existing ones with traction? I'm looking more at the list of people who are on board with it ("Trusted by open source creators" section) than who is actually running it, which I think is more important to get buy in than whoever is pulling admin strings in the back.
> Can you point out some existing ones with traction?
That's kind of the point, there are none. The question is why? If people cannot even click a button to support when it's right there...
I don't think people coming out of the VC world are going to fix it, call me cynical if you like
You said: "There are many existing projects like this", directly followed by "That's kind of the point, there are none." when asked for an example. Which one is it?
It's seems like a pretty thankless fundraising job but one where having connections to companies, banks and experience with distributing funds comes in handy. What's in it for a VC? I'd assume incoming deal flow and connections to new open source companies.
Seems more promising to me than a technical open source maintainer stepping up to do it on the side. But time will tell.
there are many existing, none with meaningful traction
it looks like there are no direct connections, they are investing, taking fees, and distributing the leftovers
Former VC!?
KV ... you gonna take that lying down? :P
> There are many existing projects like this
Also please link, we're not aware of any other endowments exclusively focused on Open Source.
Look at OP's profile: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=kvinogradov
https://runacap.com/
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 :-)
Also, it is not a VC who run things, but the team which consists of people with diverse backgrounds (founders/executives/devs x OSS/nonprofit) and the donor community (which everybody can join): https://endowment.dev/community/
It's the VC "class", similar to the Epstein Class, nowhere near as bad or vile, but have definitely been one of the primary reasons the wealth gap and inequality have risen and continue to rise
Thanks for the idea, tabbott. Made a ticket to track:
https://github.com/osendowment/foundation/issues/24
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.
I'll put a plug for the Open Source Pledge here:
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!
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.
We discussed this prior to launch, and obviously decided to launch as you see it. :) Our reasoning was that a) standardizing on GitHub URLs makes it easier to do automated analysis as part of the funding model, and b) any project important enough to matter will have at least a GitHub mirror. If you have counter-examples to (b), please comment them on GitHub (see what I did there?) or here and I will copy/paste for you. :)
https://github.com/osendowment/endowment.dev/issues/34
They haven't pulled the plug on github yet, but my understanding is that Gentoo intends to drop it long term. In general, I would expect any of the projects that leave GH because they want to avoid being used to train AI would avoid leaving even a mirror behind (since that would defeat the point). (This is not intended as a value judgement, just saying that there exist projects that are doing this)
Thanks, noted at https://github.com/osendowment/endowment.dev/issues/34#issue...
So what is your proposed solution?
Nominate any public git repo
(or at least Codeberg, SourceHut, etc.)
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.)
The details of how we're thinking about this are in:
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. ;^)
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.
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).
This is for critical oss but how to fund non-critical oss?
> 500+ OSS dependencies in an average app
insert Electron joke
edit:formatting
Inspirational stuff here Konstantin! Happy that I have the chance to take part in it!
Really cool initiative, excited to be part of it!
Glad we found some common ground together. ;^)
Happy to support it. Well done Konstantin and the team
Really happy to see this initiative come to life
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