Something I’ve been curious about for a while is why more universities don’t get involved in sponsoring critical projects. In theory it could provide an interesting non-academic path for students and professors and, as you’ve pointed out, the funding model of the U would make sense here.
I’m curious… would you consider having a “faculty” of “tenured” maintainers who receive livable funding and support based on a history of significant contribution? I could imagine something like “named chairs” and professorships you see for some tenured folks in academia. This could be useful for key project leaders, and contributors. In addition, any kind of function to train and develop the next generation of maintainers?
This would very much make sense and generate direct real world products. However, I fear academia is in itself a very competitive space for resources that doesn't necessarily want to open up for outsiders.
Well universities have no qualms about making private relationships to help subsidize private research. Let's not worry about problems that don't exist or are trivially solved.
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? Or, in the case of a state-run university, this raises all kinds of issues regarding how tax money is being given away to random schmoes instead of benefitting the public at large.
So, yeah, there's plenty of reasons why they don't do that.
Open source wouldn't have a funding problem if people would stop being so averse to just paying for what they use. Maybe... the world should stop expecting something for nothing.
> 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".
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 university. They share the same reputation-based culture and functions — collaborative creation of IP as a public good, educating each other within thematic clusters, and commercializing only a small fraction of what they produce.
For universities, humanity has just two sustainable funding models: public spending or private endowments. Government support won't work for OSS at scale — it's too globally decentralized. And yet nobody had built an OSS-focused endowment before. After understanding why, I started building one together with other OSS folks.
Today we're publicly launching the Open Source Endowment — a community-driven endowment fund dedicated to sustainably funding maintainers of the most critical open source projects. All donations are invested in a low-risk portfolio, and only the investment income (~5%/year) is used for grants, making it independent of annual budgets and tech market volatility.
We recently received US 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charity status. The fund is at ~$700K, formed by 60+ founding donors — including founders of HashiCorp, Elastic, ClickHouse, Supabase, Vue.js, Pydantic, Nginx, Gatsby, n8n, and curl. Everyone is welcome to join them and participate in governance.
There's no perfect model for distributing OSS grants. Our approach: make it open, data-driven, measurable, and developed by people with skin in the game — donors. I tested this by personally donating $5K to 800+ Python projects in Dec 2024 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42312469). We're now looking to grow our donor community and together finalize the first model for grants in Q2 2026.
This is a pure community charity, and there are two things I'd love from HN:
1) Join as a donor — any amount — and help make OSE the most efficient long-term funding solution for OSS maintainers
2) Nominate OSS projects you think are critically underfunded on the Funding page at endowment.dev
> Government support won't work for OSS at scale — it's too globally decentralized...
We recently received US 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charity status.
If this is successful in the first iteration, I'd love to see a UK and EU based charities too. That would allow european donors to support on a gross pay basis, and may simplify grants to european nationals too. (I'm sure similar things apply in other jurisdictions too.)
Most likely we won't create our own subsidiaries, but will partner with local nonprofits (suggestions are welcome), which could make donations tax-deductible for UK/EU residents.
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.
Open Collective (really Open Finance Consortium Inc.) is a US 501(c)(6) nonprofit that runs a payments and accounting platform, providing fund acceptance and budget services to a ton of different community collectives and funding groups, making it easier to connect funders with groups that are often not incorporated.
Open Source Collective is a separate 501(c)(6) organization that actively supports funders wanting to support FOSS projects or communities specifically. They share some board members, and they simply use Open Collective to do all the finance work, while also offering some level of advice and other IP holding services: https://docs.oscollective.org/welcome-and-introduction-to-os...
Open Source Endowment is different, in that it's soliciting 501(c)(3) donations, which the OSE board and membership will use for the endowment to choose FOSS projects/communities to provide grants for.
This topic should be a FAQ page on the OSE site, especially for funders who just want to donate "to some good FOSS" without knowing where to find it. When you donate to OSC, you pick specific collectives to give to (and it's not tax deductible). When you donate to OSE, you're giving to the endowment, that the OSE Members setup policies for how/where/when to provide grants to projects/communities (and it could be tax deductible).
I work on a nonprofit platform that isn't "critical infrastructure," compared to a lot of stuff, so I'd likely not seek funding, in order to avoid stealing oxygen from the lone maintainer in Nebraska.
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 to give money to vibe-coded crap, because if you have no skills or shame but want to make a little money off your AI-generated crap, why not try and extract money from this initiative? The curl guy showed this is very real.
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, not some new AI-gen stuff.
Potential issues from new tech aside, an open-source endowment is a pro-social idea, that absolutely deserves its day.
Now, setting aside ethical issues for a moment, open-sourced knowledge, writing, history, data, Q&A, and tech is essentially a prerequisite for a data-driven technology like LLMs, and if those turn out to be a net win for humanity, then we can directly trace the routes to initiatives like this one that can curate humanity's best contributions.
> flooded with requests to give money to vibe-coded crap
And our plan is to willy-nilly give money to everyone who asks for it with no oversight or attention to other factors or human involvement. Game over. You win.
Here are a couple salient portions of our IRS application to put your mind at ease. :^)
> In limited circumstances, the Foundation may make grants to organizations that are not described in IRC Section 501(c)(3), or to individual OSS developers, maintainers, researchers, and educators. These grants will support persons and organizations engaged in developing, maintaining, securing, documenting, or conducting research on free and open source software critical to public digital infrastructure.
> Any such grants will be made exclusively for charitable or educational purposes, with the Foundation retaining complete discretion and control over the use of funds consistent with Revenue Ruling 68-489.
[...]
> In addition to project-based grants, the Foundation will make recognition awards to individuals who have made extraordinary contributions to OSS serving as critical public digital infrastructure. These awards are analogous in structure and purpose to MacArthur Fellowships, the National Medal of Science, Pulitzer Prizes, and similar recognition programs administered by 501(c)(3) organizations.
Let's back up: The way an endowment works is that donors donate money, which goes into a more-or-less permanent investment fund. The interest from the investment fund is then used to a) fund mission-aligned programs (in our case, OSS), b) stay ahead of inflation, and c) pay operating costs.
Where are you seeing capitalists "extract a slice of the pie" here?
"pay operating costs" is one place non-profits often find fraud. Getting the money into the market between donors and builders, now you have to pay professional investors. You don't get to 7-8% returns without equities, what happens if the market tanks?
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?
> 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.
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 :)
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).
Consider this as a nonprofit startup that has just raised a pre-seed round. The current size of $700K is indeed immaterial, as our plan is to scale it significantly in the coming years.
The closest real-world comparable to what we are building is the Wikimedia Endowment, whose former Director is among OSE’s advisors. Like Wikimedia, we aim to be supported not only by large donations but also by contributions from large community — in our case, 150M+ GitHub users.
Our target audience is diverse - from highly successful founders to everyday developers. The Open Source Endowment is prepared to accept donations in both cash and stock from these groups.
While 5% of equity may be too much, 1% seems achievable. I am personally ready to commit 1% of the carried interest from my own VC fund to the endowment.
"Preseed round" is just the small funding when the project is a very early stage. We expect to raise more funding when the endowment matures. There is no ROI, it is a pure charity.
There are many existing projects like this, I'm not going to pick the one started by a former VC
Ask if those have not changed things, why would a VC run thing make things better? The last 2 decades have shown us what VC centeredness has brought us
Can you point out some existing ones with traction? I'm looking more at the list of people who are on board with it ("Trusted by open source creators" section) than who is actually running it, which I think is more important to get buy in than whoever is pulling admin strings in the back.
You said: "There are many existing projects like this", directly followed by "That's kind of the point, there are none." when asked for an example. Which one is it?
It's seems like a pretty thankless fundraising job but one where having connections to companies, banks and experience with distributing funds comes in handy. What's in it for a VC? I'd assume incoming deal flow and connections to new open source companies.
Seems more promising to me than a technical open source maintainer stepping up to do it on the side. But time will tell.
Not the former VC, but an active venture capitalist: https://kvinogradov.com. I earn money by investing in open source / AI / infra software startups, and I spend money by donating to nonprofit open source projects :-)
Also, it is not a VC who run things, but the team which consists of people with diverse backgrounds (founders/executives/devs x OSS/nonprofit) and the donor community (which everybody can join): https://endowment.dev/community/
It's the VC "class", similar to the Epstein Class, nowhere near as bad or vile, but have definitely been one of the primary reasons the wealth gap and inequality have risen and continue to rise
It's not a competition, but it is faux pax for GGP to make the comment the way they did. I would hope you all would know that having been here more than a decade
We all - the OSE donors - are donating personal savings to make this work, and are directly interested to make this org as efficient as possible. Having skin in the game is best way to keep such nonprofits accountable. There is no leftovers or fees - all investment income from donations goes to open source, except for minimized operating expenses (e.g. accounting). It is run by the team of volunteers without salaries, and we require $1000+/year donations from all directors of this org.
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 we use resources from the common public. Open source is like imo the common welfare/public resource. If others are abusing it, its time to call them out for what they are really doing: framing, abusing and stealing from the public and maybe we need to be more serious about this and change the public access (maybe hybrid-open source for companies who use OS software) and create systems to legally enforce these.
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!
Germany is making it work† but seems quite far off to say the least in the US. "Voluntary tax" like this is provocative in its own right, will be interesting to see what gets unlocked more broadly if this succeeds.
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. :)
They haven't pulled the plug on github yet, but my understanding is that Gentoo intends to drop it long term. In general, I would expect any of the projects that leave GH because they want to avoid being used to train AI would avoid leaving even a mirror behind (since that would defeat the point). (This is not intended as a value judgement, just saying that there exist projects that are doing this)
Not the person you replied to, but I imagine less gameable signals than stars would make sense. Download count, default installs in multiple distros, industrial use cases in the cloud all come to mind.
Maybe giving money to the endowment gives you a vote? (Kills two birds with one stone.)
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).
Highly skeptical of undemocratic organizations whose founder immediately talks dismissively of government programs. Comments from OP aren't helping either.
Just another Silicon Valley bro that wants to be in-charge of something with zero democratic control. Very typical in the current environment, which is why it should be soundly rejected.
The project has involvement from people who have spent decades dedicated to these ideas — it doesn’t seem like a vanity project or a play for control. The most cynical view is that it is beneficial to the OP because it provides access to potential investments, which, sure, isn’t a pure philanthropic venture, but that seems a pretty small price to pay. The people involved are the people you would surely want running this project.
The thing is that our endowment is focused on the "old" non-commercializable OSS projects, while VC is about "new" and commercializable stuff. The irony here is that these two things in my life lie on opposite sides of the spectrum—both in scope and risk tolerance.
There are strict regulatory rules for 501c3 nonprofits (for instance - no private benefits for nonprofit insiders) and guidelines on how to implement them, for instance, via CoI policy, which we have: https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/form-1023-purpose-...
Board members of a nonprofit are subject to external supervision, including auditing, regulators and—in extreme cases—lawsuits. The Supreme Court is unique because it is the court of last resort for the entire United States—even a state supreme court justice would be able to have their recusal decisions reviewed by a higher court, much less a random board member of a nonprofit.
What government programs in the US are stably funding open-source developers? I think most government-funded open source projects are very gunshy about looking for new funding because of the Trump administration completely politicizing grants and funding. I would not want to have to sign an anti-BDS pledge to get my open source project funded, and I would imagine that goes for many people in the community. Also, what "dismissive comments" are you referring to? The only one I saw was "Government support won't work for OSS at scale — it's too globally decentralized". Which is a fair criticism—open source projects are incredibly globalized, and getting e.g. New York State to fund an open source project that has contributors from Ukraine, India and China is a headache I don't think anyone would want to try and go through. There's just no benefit to the state administrators to fund that kind of project—they want to support parochial, home-grown projects with local ties.
I’m curious… would you consider having a “faculty” of “tenured” maintainers who receive livable funding and support based on a history of significant contribution? I could imagine something like “named chairs” and professorships you see for some tenured folks in academia. This could be useful for key project leaders, and contributors. In addition, any kind of function to train and develop the next generation of maintainers?
So, yeah, there's plenty of reasons why they don't do that.
Open source wouldn't have a funding problem if people would stop being so averse to just paying for what they use. Maybe... the world should stop expecting something for nothing.
Doesn't this apply only to for-profit products? There's plenty of 501c3's with free "products".
I have personal experience with university endowments, and at some point noticed that the open source world is remarkably similar to a top research university. They share the same reputation-based culture and functions — collaborative creation of IP as a public good, educating each other within thematic clusters, and commercializing only a small fraction of what they produce.
For universities, humanity has just two sustainable funding models: public spending or private endowments. Government support won't work for OSS at scale — it's too globally decentralized. And yet nobody had built an OSS-focused endowment before. After understanding why, I started building one together with other OSS folks.
Today we're publicly launching the Open Source Endowment — a community-driven endowment fund dedicated to sustainably funding maintainers of the most critical open source projects. All donations are invested in a low-risk portfolio, and only the investment income (~5%/year) is used for grants, making it independent of annual budgets and tech market volatility.
We recently received US 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charity status. The fund is at ~$700K, formed by 60+ founding donors — including founders of HashiCorp, Elastic, ClickHouse, Supabase, Vue.js, Pydantic, Nginx, Gatsby, n8n, and curl. Everyone is welcome to join them and participate in governance.
There's no perfect model for distributing OSS grants. Our approach: make it open, data-driven, measurable, and developed by people with skin in the game — donors. I tested this by personally donating $5K to 800+ Python projects in Dec 2024 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42312469). We're now looking to grow our donor community and together finalize the first model for grants in Q2 2026.
This is a pure community charity, and there are two things I'd love from HN:
1) Join as a donor — any amount — and help make OSE the most efficient long-term funding solution for OSS maintainers
2) Nominate OSS projects you think are critically underfunded on the Funding page at endowment.dev
If this is successful in the first iteration, I'd love to see a UK and EU based charities too. That would allow european donors to support on a gross pay basis, and may simplify grants to european nationals too. (I'm sure similar things apply in other jurisdictions too.)
https://github.com/osendowment/foundation/issues/26
Will take some time ofc but good to plant the seed now. :)
Most likely we won't create our own subsidiaries, but will partner with local nonprofits (suggestions are welcome), which could make donations tax-deductible for UK/EU residents.
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.
Open Source Collective is a separate 501(c)(6) organization that actively supports funders wanting to support FOSS projects or communities specifically. They share some board members, and they simply use Open Collective to do all the finance work, while also offering some level of advice and other IP holding services: https://docs.oscollective.org/welcome-and-introduction-to-os...
Open Source Endowment is different, in that it's soliciting 501(c)(3) donations, which the OSE board and membership will use for the endowment to choose FOSS projects/communities to provide grants for.
This topic should be a FAQ page on the OSE site, especially for funders who just want to donate "to some good FOSS" without knowing where to find it. When you donate to OSC, you pick specific collectives to give to (and it's not tax deductible). When you donate to OSE, you're giving to the endowment, that the OSE Members setup policies for how/where/when to provide grants to projects/communities (and it could be tax deductible).
I work on a nonprofit platform that isn't "critical infrastructure," compared to a lot of stuff, so I'd likely not seek funding, in order to avoid stealing oxygen from the lone maintainer in Nebraska.
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 to give money to vibe-coded crap, because if you have no skills or shame but want to make a little money off your AI-generated crap, why not try and extract money from this initiative? The curl guy showed this is very real.
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, not some new AI-gen stuff.
Now, setting aside ethical issues for a moment, open-sourced knowledge, writing, history, data, Q&A, and tech is essentially a prerequisite for a data-driven technology like LLMs, and if those turn out to be a net win for humanity, then we can directly trace the routes to initiatives like this one that can curate humanity's best contributions.
And our plan is to willy-nilly give money to everyone who asks for it with no oversight or attention to other factors or human involvement. Game over. You win.
Yeah, this will end well.
> In limited circumstances, the Foundation may make grants to organizations that are not described in IRC Section 501(c)(3), or to individual OSS developers, maintainers, researchers, and educators. These grants will support persons and organizations engaged in developing, maintaining, securing, documenting, or conducting research on free and open source software critical to public digital infrastructure.
> Any such grants will be made exclusively for charitable or educational purposes, with the Foundation retaining complete discretion and control over the use of funds consistent with Revenue Ruling 68-489.
[...]
> In addition to project-based grants, the Foundation will make recognition awards to individuals who have made extraordinary contributions to OSS serving as critical public digital infrastructure. These awards are analogous in structure and purpose to MacArthur Fellowships, the National Medal of Science, Pulitzer Prizes, and similar recognition programs administered by 501(c)(3) organizations.
Where are you seeing capitalists "extract a slice of the pie" here?
"pay operating costs" is one place non-profits often find fraud. Getting the money into the market between donors and builders, now you have to pay professional investors. You don't get to 7-8% returns without equities, what happens if the market tanks?
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?
If you find it here please let us know.
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.
> 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...
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 :)
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).
The closest real-world comparable to what we are building is the Wikimedia Endowment, whose former Director is among OSE’s advisors. Like Wikimedia, we aim to be supported not only by large donations but also by contributions from large community — in our case, 150M+ GitHub users.
Our target audience is diverse - from highly successful founders to everyday developers. The Open Source Endowment is prepared to accept donations in both cash and stock from these groups.
While 5% of equity may be too much, 1% seems achievable. I am personally ready to commit 1% of the carried interest from my own VC fund to the endowment.
Definitely something I will actively avoid after parent comment
Ask if those have not changed things, why would a VC run thing make things better? The last 2 decades have shown us what VC centeredness has brought us
That's kind of the point, there are none. The question is why? If people cannot even click a button to support when it's right there...
I don't think people coming out of the VC world are going to fix it, call me cynical if you like
It's seems like a pretty thankless fundraising job but one where having connections to companies, banks and experience with distributing funds comes in handy. What's in it for a VC? I'd assume incoming deal flow and connections to new open source companies.
Seems more promising to me than a technical open source maintainer stepping up to do it on the side. But time will tell.
it looks like there are no direct connections, they are investing, taking fees, and distributing the leftovers
KV ... you gonna take that lying down? :P
> There are many existing projects like this
Also please link, we're not aware of any other endowments exclusively focused on Open Source.
https://runacap.com/
Also, it is not a VC who run things, but the team which consists of people with diverse backgrounds (founders/executives/devs x OSS/nonprofit) and the donor community (which everybody can join): https://endowment.dev/community/
> but have definitely been one of the primary reasons the wealth gap and inequality have risen and continue to rise
That's a pretty big leap you are doing there.
I have /rant'd on YC and the dilution of help to their startups after they stopped heeding their own advice to "do things that don't scale"
Dang, got me beat, too. :) gg
By the way, only 1 out of 6 core team members is based in SV.
Taking capital, using it, taking fees, and then distributing leftovers... sounds like Trumponomics
https://github.com/osendowment/foundation/issues/24
We in general are too naive and fail to hold accountable others and ourselves from contributing back when we use resources from the common public. Open source is like imo the common welfare/public resource. If others are abusing it, its time to call them out for what they are really doing: framing, abusing and stealing from the public and maybe we need to be more serious about this and change the public access (maybe hybrid-open source for companies who use OS software) and create systems to legally enforce these.
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!
† https://www.sovereign.tech/programs/fund
Maybe a US VAT tax on the way there
https://github.com/osendowment/endowment.dev/issues/34
That might be true, but many of the mirrors are unofficial.
(or at least Codeberg, SourceHut, etc.)
Maybe giving money to the endowment gives you a vote? (Kills two birds with one stone.)
https://github.com/osendowment/model
Happy to have you join us there to iterate on the model. We do prioritize input from paid-up members ofc. ;^)
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.
insert Electron joke
edit:formatting
Just another Silicon Valley bro that wants to be in-charge of something with zero democratic control. Very typical in the current environment, which is why it should be soundly rejected.
https://endowment.dev/docs/bylaws/
What part of them is "undemocratic" in your view?
Are you getting your ethics cues from SCOTUS?
Are you aware the kinds of language that are in the legal docs on GH, and what that enables?