Strip away the buzz and the fundamentals are stark: a large share of the software powering the global internet is maintained by people who are not paid a cent for the work. Now, a group of prominent technology founders and a venture capital investor are attempting something that, surprisingly, nobody has tried before — building a permanent endowment fund to fix that.
The Open Source Endowment (OSE) launched this week describing itself as the world's first endowment fund dedicated exclusively to open source software. It has secured more than $750,000 in early commitments from over 60 founding donors and is targeting $100 million in assets within seven years, as reported by The Register. The first grants are slated for Q2 2026.
The mechanics are borrowed directly from elite universities. Every dollar donated becomes a permanent asset. Annual income, targeting a 7–8% return with a 5% spend rate, funds microgrants to the most critical but underfunded projects. A $10 million endowment at 5% would generate $500,000 every year, indefinitely. The principal itself is never spent — it stays invested and, in theory, grows forever.
A Crisis Written in Code
The problem OSE is addressing is well-documented and worsening. Open source software is typically given away, and since the community often contributes time and efforts freely, up to 86% of open source developers are not paid for their work. That figure comes from the 2024 Open Source Software Funding Survey. At the same time, OSE points out that 95% of commercial codebases rely on open source components, with an average of 500 such components per codebase.
The sustainability crisis in open source is not just about funding — it is also a matter of security. Research reveals that paid maintainers are significantly more likely to implement critical security practices. The consequences of under-resourcing were made visible by the 2014 Heartbleed vulnerability in OpenSSL and the 2021 Log4j incident, which exposed how fragile the foundation of critical digital infrastructure can be. A Ford Foundation report following Heartbleed noted that the OpenSSL project had just one full-time maintainer and earned less than $2,000 per year in donations at the time.
Outbursts of frustration from maintainers have become almost routine. In 2023, Denis Pushkarev, the maintainer of the widely used core-js library, wrote openly about how users of his software rarely offered financial support, stating that "free open source software is fundamentally broken." The year prior, Christofer Dutz — creator of Apache PLC4X — similarly lamented the uncompensated use of his work.
The University Analogy
OSE founding chairman Konstantin Vinogradov, a venture capital investor, has long argued that open source and universities share a reputation-based culture, working together to create valuable ideas for the benefit of the public, educating each other, and commercialising only a portion of what is produced. For him, that parallel points directly to the funding solution.
"For universities, humanity has just two sustainable funding models: public spending or private endowments. Government support won't work for OSS at scale — it's too globally decentralised."
— Konstantin Vinogradov, OSE founding chairman
Vinogradov is a venture investor specialising in open source, AI, and infrastructure software, and was previously a general partner at Runa Capital. Endowments require patience, he says. They invest many of their assets, spending only a fraction of their income in any given year, and require years or even decades to grow to a meaningful size. But if done right, that patience results in an independent fund that could support critical open source projects forever.
Backers of the Open Source Endowment include Thomas Dohmke, the former GitHub CEO; Mitchell Hashimoto, founder of HashiCorp, which sold to IBM for $6.4 billion; Supabase founder and CEO Paul Copplestone; an Nginx co-founder; the creators of Vue.js and cURL; plus executives from Elastic, Spotify, and others. Funding will be provided to the most significant open source projects in the form of microgrants of approximately $5,000, aimed at improving stability and security or rewarding maintainers.
Not Without Competition — or Sceptics
OSE is hardly the first organisation to try to address the funding gap. There are already bodies such as Open Collective, the Open Source Collective, and the Rust Foundation's Maintainers Fund, as well as organisations like the Software Freedom Conservancy, which provides legal and infrastructure support. Open source developers may also receive contributions from individuals, companies, and government-sponsored initiatives like Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund.
The critical difference OSE claims is permanence. Most open source funding today hinges on corporate goodwill, one-off grants, or platform tip jars. Those help, but they are episodic and often shaped by shifting product priorities. An endowment structure, by contrast, is designed to outlast any single corporate sponsor's enthusiasm for open source.
There are legitimate questions about whether $750,000 — or even the target of $100 million — is sufficient for a problem of this scale. There is also the question of influence. Some communities worry that large sponsors can nudge roadmaps or governance. The Ruby ecosystem's public dispute involving a major sponsor highlighted how fraught these relationships can become. By anchoring support in an independent endowment with diverse donors and a clear charter, the new nonprofit aims to insulate maintainers from that pressure while providing stable, long-horizon funding.
The endowment will support projects based on criteria such as user numbers, or how many other projects rely on that specific software to operate. It will also choose projects that are not already well-supported by grants, donations, or umbrella organisations such as Linux's Alpha-Omega. OSE has stated clearly that it will not fund commercial product development.
What the Smart Money Is Watching
For anyone with a stake in technology — and that now means virtually every business in Australia and globally — the OSE story is worth following for reasons beyond philanthropy. Without proper funding or support, maintainers experience burnout, leading to neglected projects. This results in security risks, decreased software quality, and ultimately a decline in the utility of the software for all users. Those are not abstract concerns; they translate directly into corporate risk and, in severe cases, regulatory exposure.
The honest assessment is that OSE remains a promising experiment, not a proven solution. Its endowment model is theoretically sound, its founding donor list is impressive, and its stated focus on underfunded but widely-used projects is exactly where the need is greatest. The harder question is whether the broader technology industry — which extracts enormous commercial value from open source while contributing comparatively little back — will embrace a voluntary funding model at meaningful scale. If the answer is yes, OSE could become something genuinely important. If corporations continue to free-ride, $100 million will remain a distant aspiration rather than a floor. Either way, the fund's first grant distributions in mid-2026 will be a telling early signal of whether the university model truly translates.