An assembly of prominent open-source developers is partnering with a venture capital investor to establish a nonprofit named the Open Source Endowment, aiming to provide a lasting solution to the ongoing challenge of funding open-source software development. 

Supporters of the Open Source Endowment comprise individuals such as Thomas Dohmke (the previous CEO of GitHub who secured a record-setting $60 million for his development tool startup Entire); Mitchell Hashimoto (founder of HashiCorp, sold to IBM for $6.4 billion last year); Supabase founder and CEO Paul Copplestone; one of the co-founders of NGINX; the creators of Vue.js and cURL; along with executives from Elastic, Spotify, and various others. Overall, the initiative has attracted over 50 contributors to date. 

The nonprofit, which has recently attained official 501(c)(3) recognition, has currently gathered more than $750,000 in pledges. If the vision of its founder, Konstantin Vinogradov, comes to fruition, it is expected to amass $100 million in assets in seven years. 

Vinogradov is a venture capitalist focusing on open-source, AI, and infrastructure software, having formerly served as a general partner at Runa Capital. He possesses “some experience with university endowments,” which are significant investors in venture capital funds, he told TechCrunch.  

According to Vinogradov, as he explored various open-source initiatives, a recurring issue emerged: “There is no reliable source of sustainable funding for open-source maintainers. And that’s a significant concern.” (“Maintainer” refers to developers involved in open-source projects, such as fixing bugs, selecting and verifying community-submitted features, or developing new features themselves.)

The endowment will finance projects based on criteria such as user count or the dependency of other projects on that specific software. It will also prioritize projects that lack sufficient support from grants, donations, or umbrella organizations like Linux’s Alpha-Omega. Vinogradov has already formed a board for the nonprofit.

Financially constrained and exhausted

The financial shortfall in open source is far from a novel issue. Open-source software is generally distributed at no cost, and since the community usually devotes time and labor voluntarily, up to 86% of open-source developers do not receive payment for their contributions.

This situation may not pose a challenge for hobbyists or professional developers employed by companies to maintain projects, but such a framework is fundamentally unstable. Open-source software forms the foundation of the internet, and nearly every major corporation utilizes open-source tools in some capacity. Indeed, open-source software constitutes as much as 55% of the technological architecture within organizations and is embedded in everything from databases to operating systems. 

Although it is certainly feasible for open-source developers to monetize their free projects to achieve substantial wealth, the likelihood, to paraphrase the Hunger Games, is not in their favor.  

There has always existed, and continues to exist, a dedicated group of developers who willingly devote their time and resources for free to oversee vital, influential, and essential projects. Many of these individuals are experiencing burnout.  

This concern briefly entered public awareness in 2014, during the OpenSSL Heartbleed incident, when a flaw was discovered in an open-source security project, relied upon by a majority of the internet, maintained solely by one developer. 

Numerous efforts have been made over the years to rectify the funding dilemma. Some initiatives accept contributions from corporate sponsors. For example, The Linux Foundation, which secured approximately $300 million last year mainly from corporate backers, disburses grants to specific projects through its Alpha-Omega Project. In 2025, Alpha-Omega granted $5.8 million to 14 projects, as reported.  

Certain projects receive contributions directly from corporations. In January, for instance, Anthropic donated $1.5 million to the Python Software Foundation. While the Foundation expressed gratitude for the funding, Anthropic itself raised $30 billion this month. For the AI lab, such a donation amounts to pocket change. 

Nevertheless, not every developer is inclined to accept corporate funding, as there are concerns regarding bestowing excessive influence to donor companies. For instance, there was significant controversy last year within the Ruby community regarding the departure of several long-term maintainers and its primary sponsor Spotify, as reported by The Register.  

The Open Source Endowment aims to support projects while mitigating such risks. 

“The only sustainable way to back open source is through private financing,” asserts Vinogradov. 

Why has an endowment not been attempted previously? Vinogradov explains that endowments necessitate patience. They allocate a significant portion of their assets for investment, utilizing only a small percentage of their income each year, and require years or even decades to achieve a meaningful scale.

However, if executed correctly, that patience can yield an independent fund capable of supporting critical open-source projects indefinitely.