alt Hacker NewsOver 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
Replies
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.
How is this different than something like https://opencollective.com (which, for example, Actual Budget uses: https://opencollective.com/actual )
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.
Tax dollars to find software
So.... you just created a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization to offer grants for product development.
Yeah, this will end well.
> 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.
> 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.)