A coalition of prominent open-source developers and a venture capital investor have launched a new nonprofit, the Open Source Endowment, aiming to create a permanent solution to the chronic funding problems faced by the open-source software community. The organisation, which has just received its formal 501(c)(3) status, has secured over $750,000 in initial commitments with an ambitious target of $100 million in assets within seven years.
Founder Konstantin Vinogradov, a venture investor specialising in open-source and AI software, stated the core problem is a lack of sustainable funding for project maintainers. "The only way to support open source sustainably is private funds," Vinogradov told TechCrunch. The endowment will invest its assets and use a portion of the returns to fund projects based on criteria like user numbers and how many other projects depend on the software.
High-Profile Backers and a Systemic Problem
The initiative has attracted over 50 donors, including major figures in the software industry. Notable backers include Thomas Dohmke, former GitHub CEO; Mitchell Hashimoto, founder of HashiCorp; Paul Copplestone, CEO of Supabase; co-founders of NGINX and Vue.js; the creator of cURL; and executives from Elastic and Spotify.
Their support targets a foundational issue: while open-source software underpins up to 55% of the technology stack in organisations and is critical to global infrastructure, up to 86% of its developers are not paid for their work. This reliance on volunteer effort creates systemic risk, highlighted by incidents like the 2014 OpenSSL Heartbleed bug, which affected much of the internet and was maintained by a single developer.
Beyond Corporate Donations
Current funding models often involve corporate grants or sponsorships. For example, The Linux Foundation's Alpha-Omega Project distributed $5.8 million to 14 projects in 2025, and Anthropic recently donated $1.5 million to the Python Software Foundation. However, such donations can be relatively small for the donating companies and raise concerns about corporate influence over project direction.
Vinogradov argues an endowment structure avoids these pitfalls through independence and long-term planning. "Endowments require patience," he said, noting they spend only a fraction of investment income annually, allowing the principal to grow over years or decades to support projects "forever."
A Long-Term Bet on Digital Infrastructure
The Open Source Endowment's board is already assembled, and the project is now focused on growing its fund. If successful, it aims to provide a perpetual, independent source of capital for the maintainers of critical digital infrastructure, moving beyond the cycle of burnout and underfunding that has long plagued the community.