Open Source Endowment – new funding source for open source maintainers

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

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?

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).

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

> 500+ OSS dependencies in an average app

insert Electron joke

edit:formatting

Great to see some positive stuff being created!

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

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 better explain what I mean by the last paragraphs.

Here's the link to it: https://gist.github.com/SerJaimeLannister/aad16377a48fe023ac...

Happy to support it. Well done Konstantin and the team

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

i just want the money how do i get it thx

Really cool initiative, excited to be part of it!

Really happy to see this initiative come to life

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.

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.

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

Happy to support it. Well done Konstantin and the team

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

> 500+ OSS dependencies in an average app

insert Electron joke

edit:formatting

This is pretty amazing. Well, atleast the idea of it but I hope that its execution can stand the tide of time.

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.

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.

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/aad16377a48fe023ac...

i just want the money how do i get it thx

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

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

Really happy to see this initiative come to life

Great to see some positive stuff being created!

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

So what is your proposed solution?

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.

Some day. :)

You can follow along w/ model development in this repo:

https://github.com/osendowment/model

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

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.

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

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

Really cool initiative, excited to be part of it!

Glad we found some common ground together. ;^)

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.

They do. Most big breakthrough software even today is made by university and national labs

Well, speaking in the case of the US, this would constitute product development which is well outside the scope of what a 501(c)(3) organization should be doing, which could thereby jeopardize their tax status? Or, in the case of a state-run university, this raises all kinds of issues regarding how tax money is being given away to random schmoes instead of benefitting the public at large.

So, yeah, there's plenty of reasons why they don't do that.

Open source wouldn't have a funding problem if people would stop being so averse to just paying for what they use. Maybe... the world should stop expecting something for nothing.

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.

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.

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.

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

> Government support won't work for OSS at scale — it's too globally decentralized... We recently received US 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charity status.

If this is successful in the first iteration, I'd love to see a UK and EU based charities too. That would allow european donors to support on a gross pay basis, and may simplify grants to european nationals too. (I'm sure similar things apply in other jurisdictions too.)

How is this different than something like https://opencollective.com (which, for example, Actual Budget uses: https://opencollective.com/actual )

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.

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.

700k from 60+ "founding donors" = an average of 11k per person.

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.

Tax dollars to find software

lets try something new

So.... you just created a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization to offer grants for product development.

Yeah, this will end well.

> 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.

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).

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

Nice! Missing https://opensourcepledge.com/ tho :)

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

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.

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.

In undemocratic organization wishes to fund my development of OpenStreetMap-related software I would gladly take money.

As long as it is not something outright evil like theoretical Gazprom Open Source Fund or something similar.

Our bylaws are pretty standard:

https://endowment.dev/docs/bylaws/

What part of them is "undemocratic" in your view?

What government programs in the US are stably funding open-source developers? I think most government-funded open source projects are very gunshy about looking for new funding because of the Trump administration completely politicizing grants and funding. I would not want to have to sign an anti-BDS pledge to get my open source project funded, and I would imagine that goes for many people in the community. Also, what "dismissive comments" are you referring to? The only one I saw was "Government support won't work for OSS at scale — it's too globally decentralized". Which is a fair criticism—open source projects are incredibly globalized, and getting e.g. New York State to fund an open source project that has contributors from Ukraine, India and China is a headache I don't think anyone would want to try and go through. There's just no benefit to the state administrators to fund that kind of project—they want to support parochial, home-grown projects with local ties.

The world's first

Open Source
Endowment

Truly sustainable funding sustainable funding for critical OSS through a community‑driven endowment

$693Kendowment fund

61total donors

44members ($1K+ donors)

A leaf-shaped squiggle

Sustainable

Provides a stable, long-term funding model, independent of volatile corporate and personal budgets.

A building block

Systemic

Supports the critical but underfunded open source projects that conventional models miss.

A performance gauge

Efficient

A lean, digital-first, community-led organization designed for maximum impact and transparency.

Trusted by open source creators, founders, executives, and investors

The global open-source community shares many parallels with how the best universities work, and we are thrilled to adopt their private endowment model to sustainably fund OSS maintainers.

A portrait of Konstantin Vinogradov

Konstantin Vinogradov

ex-General Partner at Runa Capital

Open source underpins the critical infrastructure of the global tech ecosystem, and the community-driven Endowment is a wonderful initiative to pursue its long-term sustainability.

A portrait of Mitchell Hashimoto

Mitchell Hashimoto

Co-founder, HashiCorp

The Open Source Endowment is so obvious in hindsight, it's high time we brought this model to bear on the Open Source sustainability crisis.

A portrait of Chad Whitacre

Chad Whitacre

Head of Open Source, Sentry

The Endowment is a very promising project. I am happy to join and pretty excited to see how it contributes to the FOSS funding ecosystem.

A portrait of Kailash Nadh

Kailash Nadh

CTO, Zerodha

I've been part of the OSS community for 20+ years, consistently reflecting on the huge and unfair imbalance between the value open source creates and its sustainability. The Endowment is an efficient way to give back and address this issue.

A portrait of Maxim Konovalov

Maxim Konovalov

Co-founder, Nginx

Keeping open source sustainable is a global challenge, and the Open Source Endowment provides a very promising long-term way to fund essential yet non-commercializable OSS. I'm excited to support it as a founding donor.

A portrait of Jan Oberhauser

Jan Oberhauser

Founder & CEO, n8n

Solving Open Source Sustainability Together

Our world runs on open source software that is mostly built and maintained by unpaid volunteers. Unstable funding of critical OSS poses serious risks for all of us.

>95%

software depends on OSS

500+

OSS dependencies in an average app

Problem Critical but Fragile Infrastructure

Maintainer burnout and lack of funding often lead to bugs and serious security incidents, as seen with Log4Shell, the XZ Utils backdoor, and Heartbleed. The unsustainable state of OSS financing makes critical infrastructure more fragile and puts our world at ever-growing risk.

↓

Solution OSS Community Endowment

Successfully used by leading universities for centuries, endowments spend only investment returns from donations to advance their causes, weathering economic and political volatility.

We are building a community-led endowment fund that leverages "open source alumni" to sustainably fund the most critical OSS projects. It is an open nonprofit, and everybody is welcome to join — every contribution matters.

Next-gen Nonprofit,
Based on Principles

An academy

Data-Driven & SMART Goals

Employs a data-driven, goal-based strategy, ensuring every donation makes a measurable difference.

A globe

Global Outlook

Supports the long-term health of the global open source supply chain, not of specific countries, companies, or ecosystems.

An open door

Maximum Transparency

Provides open data, public governance processes, and clear accountability in all funding decisions and operations.

Two people

Inclusive & Diverse Governance

Empowers the community to shape key strategic decisions with a focus on individuals over companies.

A global network

Decentralized Funding

A broad funding base from diverse sources makes every contribution meaningful and fosters community governance.

An umbrella

Neutrality

Remains independent from political or corporate influence, ensuring unbiased, mission-driven funding for the public good.

How It Works

Fundraising

Individuals, companies, and foundations donate to the Open Source Endowment, forming its permanent principal, which is preserved in perpetuity.

Individuals, companies and foundations donate money

Investing

The endowment principal is invested in a low-risk portfolio that generates sustainable annual returns. We target a ~5% spend rate, typical for U.S. universities.

The donated money is invested

Grantmaking

We distribute grants based on open, data-driven inputs, and our model is co-developed with the Endowment's Members and the open source community.

Grants are distributed

Impact Tracking

Supported projects are tracked for accountability, refining strategy, and maximizing OSE's positive impact. The grantmaking model is continuously refined.

The progress of grant-funded work is monitored

Backed by the tech community

Meet some of the generous donors helping make open source sustainable. Everybody is welcome — join them today!

Mitchell Hashimoto photo

Mitchell Hashimoto

Co-founder, HashiCorp

Shay Banon photo

Shay Banon

Founder & CTO, Elastic

Jan Oberhauser photo