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Open Source Endowment – new funding source for open source maintainers

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

#161

Post by numbsafari »

EarlKing wrote: post #121
KK7NIL wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? Doesn't this apply only to for-profit products? There's plenty of 501c3's with free "products".

It is not about whether or not it is available for free, at cost, or otherwise, but whether or not the activity has the character of commercial product development. It's what the product is used for, not what price it's set at. A 501(c)(3) directly developing, or funding the development, of commercial software is not engaged in charitable, educational, or other exempt activities. For reference: This is exactly what h…

There's clearly a change going on in the US government, and it very well may be that organizations such as Mozilla, FreeBSD, and Apache could all lose their 501(c)(3) tax exempt status in years to come.

At the end of the day though, 501(c)(3) status is a purely US concept, doesn't apply to international organizations internationally, and doesn't necessarily mean that you "can't" do what anyone is discussing here. It just means that folks gonna have to pay taxes and "donations" can't be written off on the taxes of donors.

Perhaps, at the end of the day, not pursuing tax-exemption/charity status is a more honest approach. It certainly doesn't precluding doing any of what has been discussed, it just changes the financial efficiency.

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

#162

Post by gtowey »

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?

So I know you're trying to shame my by pointing out my hypocrisy here, but I assure you that I wouldn't have made the original comment there if I didn't have a leg to stand on.

I am not a high net worth individual. With a 20 year career as an IC in the tech industry though, I'm quite comfortably middle class. But even I have donated $10k to charity in a single year many times. Many tech companies offer charity gift-matching programs. I take full advantage of those by having a donor advised fund so I can capture the full gift match amount every year and then disburse those funds as desired. When I was briefly at Microsoft, they had an oddly generous gift match of up to $15k per year. I literally put up $15k of my own money each year to capture that $30k/year into a charity account for several years.

That's why I feel like I can comment critically on this. I'm a regular dude who grew up dirt-poor and ended up modestly successful in life and even I can manage to donate amounts of 10's of thousands annually.

Compared to the much more successful executive, CEO, founder class who you mentioned were among your donors. To the kind who own houses in the Los Altos hills worth 10 million plus, those numbers seem kind of paltry.

I'm not trying to take away from the success of your organization and its mission. I congratulate you on your fundraising efforts and I know you can't afford to be critical of your donors lest those donors sour on you. But truly, it does strike me how some of the wealthiest among us, who have benefited the most from these common goods, can give so little.

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

#163

Post by philipallstar »

shimman wrote: post #160
philipallstar wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

While that may have felt good to write, I'm not sure that it changes the fact that this sounds like private funding of public research, rather than as was stated, public funding of private research.

Your comment I was replying to, as an aide-mémoire:

> 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.

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

#164

Post by [deleted] »

verdverm wrote: post #95
whit537 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "pay operating costs" is one place non-profits often find fraud. If you find it here please let us know.

Can you explain the 2-3% gap between expected returns and outlays? Seems like a lot more than what is needed for accounting (based on the other main person here posting)

[deleted]

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

#165

Post by pwdisswordfishy »

kvinogradov wrote: post #15
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.

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 :)

If someone has money, why would they be better off joining this as a donor instead of just giving that money directly to someone who's actually doing good and necessary work? Everything about this seems like it will be a waste of whatever resources go into it. Like that one time Mozilla decided to help, through one of its grants, to secure $400,000 in funding for... the Webpack project.

> I would not say that, let's say, founders of Nginx and curl are not interested in critical infra or don't understand it

Congratulations, you managed to pick out the two projects in the set that makes it merely "mostly" (instead of "entirely") frivolous.

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

#166

Post by kvinogradov »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #139
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!

I think my point is that grants may not be the way to get what is desired. Most people need predictable, long term income. You can get stuff done with grants, no doubt. But that's not the question - the question is can you build long term sustainable maintainance mechanisms for OSS. I hope you're right and I'm wrong.

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 positions for maintainers, which support the most critical yet risky projects. But this target scope should be dynamic and adapt to the market—global consumption of OSS; otherwise, we may end up maintaining COBOL in 2100...

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

#167

Post by kvinogradov »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #138
kvinogradov wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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+/year donation). This is an important topic, and here you can find more context on this: https://kvinogradov.com/osendowment/

I think this is really missing the point of the question. I know that it is common for endowments to be invested "in the market" - people believe that's the most responsible thing to do. But the question was about why do things the normal way? Why link up market performance of a set of investments with funding mechanisms for OSS? If you're going to be bold and try to fund something that is, in market and economic ter…

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 governance instead of large corporate donors, etc.

But all other areas should be as low-risk as possible — like accounting, legal, and investment management of a community endowment fund. We are exploring a few ideas on how to grow the fund faster than the market without increasing its risk profile, but they are complementary to a very conservative core strategy.

Besides OSE, I am a full-time VC — that's the area where investors are bold and invest in off-norm opportunities, but it lies on the totally opposite side of the investment risk spectrum. And directly mixing them does not seem like a good idea.

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

#169

Post by pdimitar »

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.

I believe the poster was referring to a one-time $5000 grant.

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

#170

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

kvinogradov wrote: post #42
the_biot wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The curl guy is one of OSE founding donors, together with the terraform guy who recently released an open source trust management system to help with AI-generated crap: https://github.com/mitchellh/vouch I think that AI eventually will solve technical maintenance problems, but not human-related ones: limited attention, trust, motivation issues. And we are going to support mostly "old" projects everybody relies on, no…

NPOs are constantly “running a tight ship.” I suspect a lot of HNers would be aghast at the limited resources available. I’ve been doing NPO work for decades.

LLMs represent a very important opportunity to force-multiply limited resources.

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