A group of prominent open-source developers is collaborating with a venture capital investor to establish a nonprofit named the Open Source Endowment, aiming to address the recurring challenge of funding for open-source software development.
Supporters of the Open Source Endowment include Thomas Dohmke (former GitHub CEO who secured a record $60 million for his startup Entire); Mitchell Hashimoto (founder of HashiCorp, acquired by IBM for $6.4 billion); Supabase founder and CEO Paul Copplestone; an NGINX co-founder; the creators of Vue.js and cURL; alongside executives from Elastic, Spotify, and others. The initiative has garnered over 50 donors so far.
The nonprofit, which recently obtained formal 501(c)(3) status, has amassed over $750,000 in commitments. Founder Konstantin Vinogradov envisions accumulating $100 million in assets within seven years.
Vinogradov, a venture investor with expertise in open-source, AI, and infrastructure software, previously served as a general partner at Runa Capital. He noted that “there is no source of sustainable funding for open-source maintainers,” which he identified as a significant issue. (“Maintainers” are developers who manage open-source projects, involving tasks like debugging, evaluating and implementing features, or developing new ones.)
The endowment will back projects based on criteria such as user base size or project dependencies. It will also select projects that are not already adequately funded by grants, donations, or organizations like Linux’s Alpha-Omega. Vinogradov has established a board for the nonprofit.
The absence of funding in open-source is nothing new. Open-source software is usually available for free, and with the community often volunteering their time, up to 86% of open-source developers are unpaid for their work.
This isn’t a major issue for hobbyists or professional developers funded by their companies to maintain projects, but this model is delicate. Open-source software is foundational to the internet, used by virtually every large company in some capacity. Open-source software represents up to 55% of the tech stack in organizations, present in components ranging from databases to operating systems.
While open-source developers can potentially commercialize their projects for significant financial gain, the likelihood is slim. A core group of developers has spent decades volunteering their time to manage key projects, many experiencing burnout.
Public awareness of this issue was briefly heightened in 2014 with the OpenSSL Heartbleed incident, where a bug was discovered in an open-source security project maintained by a single developer.
Various attempts to resolve the funding issue have emerged over the years. Some projects accept donations from corporate sponsors, like The Linux Foundation, which received about $300 million last year primarily from corporate donations, supporting select projects through its Alpha-Omega Project. In 2025, Alpha-Omega allocated $5.8 million to 14 projects.
Some projects receive direct corporate contributions. For example, in January, Anthropic contributed $1.5 million to the Python Software Foundation. Although the Foundation was pleased with the donation, Anthropic raised $30 billion that month, a small amount compared to their resources.
Nevertheless, some developers are hesitant to accept corporate donations due to concerns about donor companies exerting too much influence. For instance, the Ruby community faced issues last year with long-time maintainers departing and its main sponsor Spotify.
The Open Source Endowment aims to support projects while mitigating these concerns. “The only way to support open source sustainably is private funds,” says Vinogradov.
Why hasn’t an endowment been attempted before? Vinogradov explains that endowments demand patience, investing most of their assets and spending only a portion of their income annually, growing over years or decades to reach substantial size.
However, if managed correctly, this patience could create an independent fund capable of eternally supporting vital open-source projects.