A group of notable open source programmers are joining with a VC investor to launch a nonprofit called the Open Source Endowment in hopes of permanently solving the perennial issue with developing open source software: funding.
Backers of the Open Source Endowment include Thomas Dohmke (the former GitHub CEO who raised a record $60 million for his dev tool startup Entire); Mitchell Hashimoto (founder of HashiCorp, which sold to IBM for $6.4 billion last year); Supabase founder and CEO Paul Copplestone; an NGINX co-founder; the creators of Vue.js and cURL; plus execs from Elastic, Spotify, and others. All told, the project has over 50 donors so far.
The nonprofit, which just achieved formal 501(c)(3) status, has currently raised more than $750,000 in commitments. But if things go according to the plan of its founder, Konstantin Vinogradov, it will have $100 million in assets within seven years.
Vinogradov is a venture investor specializing in open source, AI, and infrastructure software, and was previously a general partner at Runa Capital. As such, he has “some experience with university endowments,” which are some of the largest investors in venture capital funds, he told TechCrunch.
Vinogradov says as he scoured the world for open source projects, one complaint kept popping up: “There is no source of sustainable funding for open source maintainers. And that’s a really big problem.” (“Maintainer” refers to the developers who work on open source projects, such as debugging, choosing and verifying features submitted by the community, or programming new features themselves.)
The endowment will support projects based on criteria such as its number of users, or how many other projects rely on that specific software to operate. It will also choose projects that are not already well-supported by grants, donations, or umbrella organizations such as Linux’s Alpha-Omega. Vinogradov has already assembled a board for the nonprofit.
Cash strapped, burned out
The lack of money in open source is hardly new. Open source software is typically given away, and since the community often contributes time and efforts freely, up to 86% of open source developers are not paid for their work.
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