The Open Source Endowment, a nonprofit foundation focused on providing grants to significant open source projects, has been announced. Unlike existing foundations that distribute incoming donations, the Open Source Endowment is based on the idea of establishing an endowment, which allows for uninterrupted funding, unaffected by fluctuations in the technology market, budget cuts, and the volume of incoming donations.
In the Open Source Endowment, donations are not distributed directly to grant recipients, but are invested in a low-risk securities portfolio. Only the investment income, which averages approximately 5% per year, is used to pay out grants. This model of non-profit foundations has become widespread in funding research at universities. It is noted that the Open Source world is in many ways similar to a research university, sharing a similar reputation-based culture and similar functions: the joint creation of intellectual property for the public good, mutual learning within subject-matter communities, and the commercialization of only a small portion of the results.
Funding will be provided to the most significant open source projects in the form of microgrants of approximately $5000, aimed at improving stability and security or rewarding maintainers. Only independent projects that are not affiliated with corporations, startups, or venture capitalists are eligible. The first payments are scheduled for the second quarter of 2026.
Grant recipients are nominated through a special form on the website. Funding is then selected from the applications received using a risk assessment model and community input. The selection process takes into account metrics such as number of downloads, volume of dependent projects, involvement in critical systems, codebase size, security posture, number of active contributors, maintenance status, and dependency on individuals (bus factor). Selected projects receive approval from the foundation's donors and are then finally approved by the board of directors.
The fund was founded by Konstantin Vinogradov, a venture capitalist specializing in open source software, AI, and infrastructure projects, and a former partner at the venture capital fund Runa Capital. The board of directors includes Chad Whitacre (creator of the Open Source Pledge and Fair Source initiatives), Maxim Konovalov (co-founder of Nginx), and Konstantin Vinogradov. Jonathan Starr (co-founder of SciOS and the Institute for Open Science Practices) has been appointed executive director. The oversight committee includes Amy Parker (head of the OpenSSL Foundation) and Vlad-Stefan Harbuz (maintainer of the Open Source Pledge and a key developer of the thanks.dev service).
The Foundation's endowment currently stands at $693,000. 61 major donors and 44 contributors have joined the project, each with a donation of approximately $1,000. The largest donations, exceeding $100,000, were made by Igor Sysoev (creator of Nginx), Mitchell Hashimoto (co-founder of HashiCorp), and Kailash Nadh (CTO of Zerodha).
Contributors who donated between $10 and $100 included Konstantin Vinogradov, Maxim Konovalov, Shay Banon (founder of Elastic), and Evan You (creator of Vue.js and Vite). Also participating in the project were the director of the Apache Software Foundation, the chairman of the board of the Open Source Initiative, the director of Gen AI at NVIDIA, and the CTO. Linux Foundation, former head of GitHub, and founders or co-founders of projects such as ClickHouse, Apache Arrow, cURL, Archestra, n8n, and Percona.
Source: opennet.ru
