Open Source Endowment – new funding source for open source maintainers

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...

> Why not build something super minimal that requires less management and operating costs? That doesn't have the market risk at the center of it all? That doesn't have more points for fraud and abuse?

could still be usefully addressed.

I guess this is core of plan and will not change?

Because I was thinking about projects like OpenStreetMap which are generating very useful data used by various open source projects, but are not by itself gathering very big pile of dependencies.

I guess that those would be out of scope.

(note: for OpenStreetMap itself I have gigantic conflict of interest, I received some OSM-related grants for software development)

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.