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Open Source Endowment – new funding source for open source maintainers

endowment.dev

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Re: Open Source Endowment – new funding source for open source maintainers

#11

Post by pwdisswordfishy »

kvinogradov wrote: post #2

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 universi…

> 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.

Re: Open Source Endowment – new funding source for open source maintainers

#12

Post by whit537 »

bombcar wrote: post #10
kvinogradov wrote: post #2

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 universi…

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.

Re: Open Source Endowment – new funding source for open source maintainers

#13

Post by whit537 »

ymolodtsov wrote: post #4

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).

Re: Open Source Endowment – new funding source for open source maintainers

#14

Post by whit537 »

pwdisswordfishy wrote: post #11
kvinogradov wrote: post #2

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 universi…

> 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...

Re: Open Source Endowment – new funding source for open source maintainers

#15

Post by kvinogradov »

pwdisswordfishy wrote: post #11
kvinogradov wrote: post #2

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 universi…

> 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.

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 :)

Re: Open Source Endowment – new funding source for open source maintainers

#19

Post by tabbott »

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).

Re: Open Source Endowment – new funding source for open source maintainers

#20

Post by whit537 »

nwellnhof wrote: post #16

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

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