A new nonprofit, the Open Source Endowment, is investing donations into a permanent corpus to generate steady grants for critical open-source projects, tackling chronic maintainer underfunding.
Open Source Endowment (OSE) has launched as what it calls the world’s first dedicated endowment fund for open-source software, introducing a permanent, investment-led model designed to make OSS funding sustainable rather than donation dependent.
Structured as a US 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charity, OSE will invest all contributions into a growing principal and distribute only the investment income as grants. The capital remains intact, mirroring university-style endowments and enabling predictable, long-term support for critical infrastructure.
The approach has already attracted roughly $700,000 from more than 60 founding donors, including founders of ClickHouse, curl, Elastic, HashiCorp, Nginx, and Vue.js, among others.
Grants will target existing, widely used nonprofit and independent projects only, with no funding for commercial product development. Donors contributing more than $1,000 can become members and participate in governance, while grant processes are published publicly.
The model responds to a stark imbalance: 95 percent of codebases depend on open source, each averaging 500 components, yet 86 percent of contributors receive no pay. “Free open source software is fundamentally broken,” said Denis Pushkarev, maintainer of core-js.
OSE founding chairman Konstantin Vinogradov argued, “For universities, humanity has just two sustainable funding models: public spending or private endowments,” adding that government backing “won’t work for OSS at scale – it’s too globally decentralized.” He added, “OSE won’t give money for commercial product development – it is dedicated to supporting existing highly-used nonprofit and independent OSS.”
