A group of notable open source programmers are joining with a VC investor to launch a nonprofit called the Open Source Endowment in hopes of permanently solving the perennial issue with developing open source software: funding.
Backers of the Open Source Endowment include Thomas Dohmke (the former GitHub CEO who raised a record $60 million for his dev tool startup Entire); Mitchell Hashimoto (founder of HashiCorp, which sold to IBM for $6.4 billion last year); Supabase founder and CEO Paul Copplestone; an NGINX co-founder; the creators of Vue.js and cURL; plus execs from Elastic, Spotify, and others. All told, the project has over 50 donors so far.
The nonprofit, which just achieved formal 501(c)(3) status, has currently raised more than $750,000 in commitments. But if things go according to the plan of its founder, Konstantin Vinogradov, it will have $100 million in assets within seven years.
Vinogradov is a venture investor specializing in open source, AI, and infrastructure software, and was previously a general partner at Runa Capital. As such, he has “some experience with university endowments,” which are some of the largest investors in venture capital funds, he told TechCrunch.
Vinogradov says as he scoured the world for open source projects, one complaint kept popping up: “There is no source of sustainable funding for open source maintainers. And that’s a really big problem.” (“Maintainer” refers to the developers who work on open source projects, such as debugging, choosing and verifying features submitted by the community, or programming new features themselves.)
The endowment will support projects based on criteria such as its number of users, 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 organizations such as Linux’s Alpha-Omega. Vinogradov has already assembled a board for the nonprofit.
Cash strapped, burned out
The lack of money in open source is hardly new. 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.
This isn’t much of a problem for hobbyists or for professional developers paid by their companies to maintain projects, but such a system stands on shaky ground. Open source software is the bedrock upon which the internet stands, and virtually every large company uses open source tools in some way. In fact, open source software accounts for up to 55% of the tech stack in organizations, and is present in everything from databases to operating systems.
While it is certainly possible for open source developers to commercialize their free projects to gain wealth beyond their wildest dreams, the odds, to misquote the Hunger Games, are not in their favor.
There is, and has been for decades, a core of developers who volunteer their time and efforts for free to manage popular, important, and critical projects. And many of them are burned out.
This issue came into the public’s consciousness briefly in 2014, with the OpenSSL Heartbleed disaster, where a bug was found in an open source security project, used by most of the internet, that was maintained by a single developer.
There have been many attempts to fix the funding situation over the years. Some projects take donations from corporate sponsors. For instance, The Linux Foundation, which brought in about $300 million last year largely from corporate sponsors, doles out grants to select projects through its Alpha-Omega Project. In 2025, Alpha-Omega issued $5.8 million to 14 projects, it said.
Some projects take donations directly from corporate donors. In January, for instance, Anthropic donated $1.5 million to the Python Software Foundation. While the Foundation said it was thrilled to have that cash, Anthropic itself raised $30 billion this month. Such a donation is couch-change to the AI lab.
Still, not every developer wants to take corporate donations, as there are worries of granting too much influence to donor companies. For instance, there was a big hubbub last year in the Ruby community surrounding some long-time maintainers leaving and its big sponsor Shopify, The Register reported.
The Open Source Endowment hopes to support projects while displacing such risks.
“The only way to support open source sustainably is private funds,” says Vinogradov.
Why hasn’t an endowment been tried before? Endowments require patience, Vinogradov 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 will result in an independent fund that could support critical open source projects forever.