Tools: Open Source Endowment – New Funding Source For Open Source Maintainers

Provides a stable, long-term funding model, independent of volatile corporate and personal budgets.

Supports the critical but underfunded open source projects that conventional models miss.

A lean, digital-first, community-led organization designed for maximum impact and transparency.

The global open-source community shares many parallels with how the best universities work, and we are thrilled to adopt their private endowment model to sustainably fund OSS maintainers.

Open source underpins the critical infrastructure of the global tech ecosystem, and the community-driven Endowment is a wonderful initiative to pursue its long-term sustainability.

The Open Source Endowment is so obvious in hindsight, it's high time we brought this model to bear on the Open Source sustainability crisis.

The Endowment is a very promising project. I am happy to join and pretty excited to see how it contributes to the FOSS funding ecosystem.

I've been part of the OSS community for 20+ years, consistently reflecting on the huge and unfair imbalance between the value open source creates and its sustainability. The Endowment is an efficient way to give back and address this issue.

Keeping open source sustainable is a global challenge, and the Open Source Endowment provides a very promising long-term way to fund essential yet non-commercializable OSS. I'm excited to support it as a founding donor.

Maintainer burnout and lack of funding often lead to bugs and serious security incidents, as seen with Log4Shell, the XZ Utils backdoor, and Heartbleed. The unsustainable state of OSS financing makes critical infrastructure more fragile and puts our world at ever-growing risk.

Source: HackerNews