Open Source Endowment – new funding source for open source maintainers • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by mannanj » Sun, Mar 01, 2026, 2:12 PM UTC

whit537 wrote: post #25

mannanj wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not an expert here on equity, 5% feels a bit high. I like the idea - even 1% would be significant. In general, could we start to hold accountable and start using public status and tracking of organizational commitment to the open source software they use and make profit off of - that might help a lot as well. We in general are too naive and fail to hold accountable others and ourselves from contributing back when…

I'll put a plug for the Open Source Pledge here: https://opensourcepledge.com/members/ The companies listed there have all paid at least $2000/eng on staff/year to OSS maintainers. Real accountability. Endowment accepts corporate donors but is primarily geared towards individuals at this point. Pledge members are all companies. Both/and ... to the OSS moon!

That list is embarrassingly tiny. Not a single Fortune 100 company on there.

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

#172

Post by kvinogradov » Mon, Mar 02, 2026, 1:51 PM UTC

gtowey wrote: post #162

kvinogradov wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-m…

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 successful 34-year-old tech dude.

We are not building yet another HNWI-focused nonprofit, but a grassroots community endowment. It targets a donor like you – a regular tech industry worker who can support things they truly care about with a $1-100k donation. I think many developers love open source, don't they?

We intentionally targeted launching the endowment with a $0.5-1m initial size and many donors because:

1) It is not attractive for regular donors to support a project that is heavily funded by HNWIs. Let's say if I were able to donate to the Gates Foundation, it would be like peeing in the ocean and wouldn't matter. However, I am eager to support projects with peers among donors because it makes a difference. And that's the way to make OSE scalable and outlive all its founders.

2) It is important to maintain high decentralization of funding, which enables good community governance and accountability. Having a few outsized donors at the start kills it. Our donor Herfindahl–Hirschman index is ~1800 now.

3) As a VC (maybe a bit old school), I think that it is responsible to limit funding size at very early stages and grow it later together with achieved milestones and decreasing risks. It helps to build more efficient organizations.

Just take a look at https://endowment.dev/community - we obviously targeted notable founders at the start, but now it is a healthy mix with many everyday developers. You're welcome to join them.

Of course, OSE will look for large donations. But the goal is to raise them in balance with growing a community of smaller donors, maintaining decentralization and scalability.

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

#173

Post by kvinogradov » Mon, Mar 02, 2026, 8:26 PM UTC

pdimitar wrote: post #169

psychoslave wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$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.

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 naturally move to another project.

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

#174

Post by kvinogradov » Mon, Mar 02, 2026, 8:48 PM UTC

psychoslave wrote: post #152

whit537 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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 salary of a software engineer is $5,906/month, and the OSE membership is $83/month ($1,000/year), so it would require donating ~1.4% of gross income. This aligns fully with the 1-2% of income that an average U.S. individual donates every year, and we are targeting more senior engineers, not the average ones.

So it is affordable for our target audience, but requires some personal commitment. To be efficient in the long term, an endowment must be managed by people who have skin in the game.

It would also be irresponsible to have people who can't or don't want to personally donate $1,000 to our cause, or people outside of the tech industry, managing a multi-million-dollar community fund focused on solving a pretty niche industry problem. Otherwise, the endowment ends up being as efficient as a typical government!

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

#175

Post by kvinogradov » Mon, Mar 02, 2026, 9:12 PM UTC

pwdisswordfishy wrote: post #165

kvinogradov wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 privately, and the largest public case among our donors seems to be https://ziglang.org/news/300k-from-mitchellh/

It requires choosing projects, and most people don't have time for this.

But the main problem is that such funding is simply not sustainable: corporate annual budgets for OSS are volatile, and individual donations are extremely volatile. It is not great for the critical infrastructure we all rely on.

The Open Source Endowment enables truly sustainable funding and also decreases the entry barrier for new OSS donors because it does not require choosing a specific project. A la buying the S&P 500 ETF instead of stock picking.

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

Out of curiosity, which founding donors specifically would qualify under your criteria for a "serious" project? If the founders of HashiCorp, Elastic, ClickHouse, Supabase, Nginx, and curl seem like a mostly frivolous band to you...

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

#176

Post by kvinogradov » Mon, Mar 02, 2026, 9:25 PM UTC

nwellnhof wrote: post #153

kvinogradov wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 limited target scope — not just any software, but critical nonprofit independent OSS — it was acceptable, and the IRS approved our 501(c)(3) status. And we plan to operate within what is described in our application.