Viewing profile — kvinogradov

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…

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 …

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 salar…

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…

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 successf…

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 govern…

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 posi…

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+/yea…

“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…

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 b…

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 donat…

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 o…

Exactly! A few more considerations on gov support of OSS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47171562

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 spe…

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://…

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 lear…

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 …

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

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 po…

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 thin…

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 wa…

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 no…

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 donatin…

What are your specific concerns? By the way, only 1 out of 6 core team members is based in SV.

"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.…