Open source projects, ever short of funding, have a potential new source of revenue in the form of the Open Source Endowment (OSE).
The organization describes itself as “the world’s first endowment fund for open source software.”
There are certainly other organizations that help fund open source software, such as Open Collective, Open Source Collective, and the Rust Foundation’s Maintainers Fund, not to mention organizations like the Software Freedom Conservancy, which provides legal and infrastructure support to open source projects. Open source developers may also be fortunate enough to receive contributions from individuals, companies (when not passing the buck), and government-sponsored initiatives like Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund.
But OSE aspires specifically to build a big pile of cash – an endowment – that it will dole out to deserving open source projects.
It’s certainly needed. In 2023, Denis Pushkarev, maintainer of the widely used
core-jslibrary, vented his frustration with the fact that users of his software seldom offer financial support. “Free open source software is fundamentally broken,” he said.The year before that, Christofer Dutz – creator of Apache PLC4X – lamented uncompensated use of his software. Earlier in 2022, Google talked up the need to support critical open source infrastructure, citing the log4j vulnerability.
But concerns about the sustainability of open source go back further still. Two years after the 2014 Heartbleed vulnerability – a dangerous flaw in OpenSSL – a Ford Foundation report noted that the OpenSSL project is critical internet infrastructure yet had just one full-time maintainer and earned less than $2,000 per year in donations.
As OSE points out, 95 percent of codebases rely on open source software, each of which has an average of 500 open source components. And yet 86 percent of open source contributors receive no payment for their work.
OSE founding chairman Konstantin Vinogradov, a venture capital investor, previously said he wanted to replicate the funding model that has sustained universities.
And he reiterated that aspiration in a Hacker News post announcing OSE.
Universities and the open source community, he argues, share reputation-based culture and functions, working together to create valuable ideas for the benefit of the public, educating each other, and commercializing only a portion of what’s produced.
“For universities, humanity has just two sustainable funding models: public spending or private endowments,” Vinogradov explained. “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.”
Vinogradov said the OSE, a US 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charity, aims to make open source development more sustainable through a community-driven endowment. Donations will be invested and only investment income will be disbursed through grants – the principal funds will remain invested in the hope of growth.
Presently, the fund stands at around $700,000, thanks to contributions from more than 60 founding donors, including the founders of ClickHouse, curl, Elastic, Gatsby, HashiCorp, n8n, Nginx, Pydantic, Supabase, and Vue.js.
Donations go directly to the fund, and those who give over $1,000 can become OSE Members, which includes certain rights to participate in OSE governance.
The group has detailed its grant selection process on the OSE website and in its GitHub repository.
According to Vinogradov, “OSE won’t give money for commercial product development – it is dedicated to supporting existing highly-used nonprofit and independent OSS.”
Source: Open Source Endowment aims to raise big pile of money • The Register
Robin Edgar
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