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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

#151

Post by psychoslave »

kvinogradov wrote: post #132
gtowey wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 donation matters, and hugely respect everybody supporting open source. May I ask what it’s the right share of net worth one should donate to OSS? And what’s this share in your personal case?

Not everyone operate on same consideration regarding money. The mere fact to be able to donate something that is a significant portion of a median income salary is already the privilege of the most wealthy, so more than that this is the very limited realms of the winner take it all game of the casino or the casino owner. For this class of people, money has nothing to do with what it represents to most people. So there is no way people from these distinct classes can understand each other in term "share of net worth", because they are the same words that refer to completely different realities.

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

#152

Post by psychoslave »

whit537 wrote: post #14
pwdisswordfishy wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

$1000 to join the discussion table, wow, that's an extremely high bar. What is the motivation of such an excluding entry barrier?

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

#153

Post by nwellnhof »

kvinogradov wrote: post #109
EarlKing wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boldly asserting that all grants will be made exclusively for charitable or educational purposes does nothing to change the character of the grant. If you're giving money to someone for commercial product development then you're giving money to someone for commercial product development ... and if that constitutes the majority of what you do then you've got a major problem.

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://endowment.dev/faq/#grants

As soon as you start paying individual maintainers, it stops being nonprofit OSS they work on. If you direct your funds to other charities, you're only shifting the tax issue to them. If you want to give money to maintainers with no strings attached, it's basically impossible to avoid double taxation.

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

#154

Post by PathfinderBot »

the_biot wrote: post #23
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…

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 t…

> It makes no sense for a foundation supporting open source to also support this massive copyright massacre.

Copyright is a fundamentally unethical concept and must die. Open source foundations should rightfully support the death of copyright, whether by LLMs or by other means.

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

#155

Post by philipallstar »

shimman wrote: post #105
philipallstar wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give an example of what you mean?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/12/06/academi... https://archive.ph/0MzkZ https://www.wired.com/story/top-ai-researchers-financial-bac... I live in Cambridge, MA there are dozens of these relationships going on; big tech offers lucrative access to cutting edge hardware in return for closed research. Just more insidious ways on how big tech requires massive amounts of welfare to exist and persist.

I might be misreading, but at least the first article looks more like private companies subsidising public research, and not the other way round.

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

#156

Post by bombolo »

psychoslave wrote: post #148
kvinogradov wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 but also by allocating attention. As it grows bigger, the grant size will also grow. One can help with this by donating and bringing in new donors!

$5000 is enough to make a living in several countries. On a global scale, likely less than 10% of the world's population has ever been able to save $5,000 at any point in their life, with the vast majority concentrated in high-income countries. In low- and middle-income countries, this is a rare achievement limited to a small, affluent minority.

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

#157

Post by bombolo »

orangecoffee wrote: post #127
giancarlostoro wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What happened with Wikipedia? I thought they run a tight optimum ship?

[dead]

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

#158

Post by snowhale »

tabbott wrote: post #19

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.…

[dead]

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

#159

Post by mte90 »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #98
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…

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.

As long time volunteer contributor in Mozilla (I am in the firefox credits and in the monument) it is very sad to say that I agree with you.

I have my opinion on why this is happening and my explanation is that in Mozilla they lost their memory because they act as a company and not as a foundation (they have both the identities). With the layoffs they removed a lot of people working there for years that knows a lot, they lost the historic memory and I remember a lot of discussion with employees that had no idea that there was a community or that they have no idea what is a GPL license. I mean in 2018 I remember reviewing this as part of the Mozilla Reps council, https://github.com/OpenTechStrategies/open-source-archetypes that was created to help the employee to understand OSS but I think that after the managers that created moved away it was just left as it is.

Sorry for the flame but I think that when a foundation act like a corporation there are issues.

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

#160

Post by shimman »

philipallstar wrote: post #155
shimman wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/12/06/academi... https://archive.ph/0MzkZ https://www.wired.com/story/top-ai-researchers-financial-bac... I live in Cambridge, MA there are dozens of these relationships going on; big tech offers lucrative access to cutting edge hardware in return for closed research. Just more insidious ways on how big tech requires massive amounts of welfare to exist and persist.

I might be misreading, but at least the first article looks more like private companies subsidising public research, and not the other way round.

Ah yes, they totally subsidize public research with no strings attach. Right up there with cigarette companies subsidizing public health research. Or oil companies subsidizing public research. Or all the other various industries funding research that somehow always seems to agree with what they want, weird right?

Good lord. Why do you think these greedy entities that have devoted their entire lifespans fucking over consumers, competitors, nations, and children are suddenly having a change of heart and aren't enforcing their will upon researchers?

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