Venture capital and some big-name programmers are constantly trying to solve the open source funding problem

A group of prominent open source programmers are joining with a venture capital investor to launch a non-profit called the Open Source Endowment in hopes of solving the perennial problem with sustainable open source software development: funding.

The Open Source Endowment’s backers include Thomas Domke (former GitHub CEO who raised a record $60 million to start up his entire development tool); Mitchell Hashimoto (founder of HashiCorp, which sold to IBM for $6.4 billion last year); Supabase founder and CEO Paul Copleston; Co-founder of NGINX; Vue.js and cURL builders; As well as executives from Elastic, Spotify and others. Finally, the project has more than 50 donors to date.

The nonprofit, which just achieved official 501(c)(3) status, has currently raised more than $750,000 in commitments. But if things go according to plan by its founder, Konstantin Vinogradov, it will have assets worth $100 million within seven years.

Vinogradov is an investor specializing in open source software, artificial intelligence and infrastructure, and was previously a general partner at Runa Capital. As such, he has “some experience dealing with university endowments,” which are among the largest investors in venture capital funds, he told TechCrunch.

“There’s no sustainable funding source for open source maintainers,” Vinogradov says as he scoured the world for open source projects, one complaint kept coming up. “And that’s a really big problem.” (“Maintainer” refers to developers who work on open source projects, such as debugging, selecting and verifying community-submitted features, or programming new features themselves.)

The endowment will support projects based on criteria such as the number of users, or the number of other projects that rely on that specific software to function. It will also choose projects that are not already well supported by grants, donations, or umbrella organizations like Alpha-Omega for Linux. Vinogradov has already assembled a board of directors for the nonprofit.

Cash tied up, burned

The lack of money in open source is nothing new. Open source software is often abandoned, and since the community often freely contributes time and effort, up to 86% of open source developers are not paid for their work.

This isn’t a big problem for hobbyists or professional developers whose companies pay them to maintain projects, but such a system is on shaky ground. Open source software is the foundation of the Internet, and almost every large company uses open source tools in some way. In fact, open source software represents up to 55% of an organization’s technology stack, and is found in everything from databases to operating systems.

While it’s certainly possible for open source developers to market their free projects to earn a fortune beyond their wildest dreams, the odds of misquoting “The Hunger Games” are not in their favor.

There has been, for decades, a core group of developers who volunteer their time and efforts for free to manage popular, important, and vital projects. Many of them are burned.

This issue came to public awareness briefly in 2014, with the OpenSSL Heartbleed debacle, in which a bug was found in an open source security project, used by most of the Internet, that was maintained by a single developer.

There have been numerous attempts to reform the funding situation over the years. Some projects take donations from corporate sponsors. For example, the Linux Foundation, which brought in about $300 million last year mostly from corporate sponsors, provides grants to select projects through the Alpha-Omega Project. In 2025, Alpha-Omega will release $5.8 million to 14 projects, she added.

Some projects receive donations directly from corporate donors. In January, for example, Anthropic donated $1.5 million to the Python Software Foundation. While the foundation expressed its happiness at receiving these funds, Anthropic itself raised $30 billion this month. Such a donation would be a game-changer for the AI ​​lab.

However, not every developer wants to receive corporate donations, as there are concerns about giving too much influence to corporate donors. For example, there was a lot of buzz last year in the Ruby community about the departure of some longtime maintainers and its major sponsor Shopify, The Register reported.

The Open Source Endowment hopes to support projects while removing these risks.

“The only way to support open source sustainably is with private money,” says Vinogradov.

Why had the moratorium not been tried before? Vinogradov says endowments require patience. They invest a lot of their assets, spend only a small portion of their income in any given year, and take years or even decades to grow to a reasonable size.

But if done right, this patience will create an independent fund that can support important open source projects in perpetuity.