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

A group of prominent open source programmers join with a venture capital investor to launch a non-profit organization called The endowment is open source Hoping to permanently solve the perennial problem through open source software development: funding.

Supporters of the open source moratorium include Thomas Domke (former CEO of GitHub who raised A record $60 million to start up his entire development tool); Mitchell Hashimoto (Founder, HashiCorp) Which was sold to IBM for $6.4 billion last year); Founder and CEO of Supabase 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 its founder’s plan, Konstantin VinogradovIt 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 They do not get 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 accounts for Up to 55% of an enterprise’s technology stackIt is found in everything from databases to operating systems.

While it is certainly possible for open source developers to market their free projects To obtain wealth beyond their dreamsThe odds of “The Hunger Games” being misquoted 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. And many of them are I was burned.

This issue entered the public consciousness briefly in 2014, with OpenSSL Heartbleed Disaster, The bug was found in an open source security project, used by most of the Internet, and which 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 created $300 million last year Largely corporate sponsors, grants are provided 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 said it was thrilled to receive these funds, Anthropic It 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 long-time maintainers and its major sponsor Shopify, The record 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.