A group of notable open-source programmers are joining with a venture capital investor to launch a nonprofit called the Open Source Endowment. Their goal is to permanently solve the perennial issue of funding open-source software development. Backers include Thomas Dohmke, the former GitHub CEO who raised a record sixty million dollars for his dev tool startup; Mitchell Hashimoto, founder of HashiCorp, which sold to IBM for six point four billion dollars last year; Supabase founder and CEO Paul Copplestone; an NGINX co-founder; the creators of Vue.js and cURL; plus executives from Elastic and Spotify. All told, the project has over fifty donors so far.
The nonprofit, which just achieved formal 501(c)(3) status, has currently raised more than seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars in commitments. Founder Konstantin Vinogradov plans for it to grow to one hundred million dollars 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. He has some experience with university endowments, which are some of the largest investors in venture capital funds.
Vinogradov says that as he evaluated open-source projects, one complaint kept appearing: there is no source of sustainable funding for open-source maintainers. He notes that this is a really big problem. A maintainer refers to the developers who work on open-source projects, handling tasks like debugging, verifying community-submitted features, or programming new features themselves.
The endowment will support projects based on criteria such as the 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 like Linux’s Alpha-Omega. Vinogradov has already assembled a board for the nonprofit.
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 effort freely, up to eighty-six percent 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 fifty-five percent of the tech stack in organizations and is present in everything from databases to operating systems.
While it is possible for open-source developers to commercialize their free projects to gain significant wealth, the odds are not in their favor. For decades, a core of developers has volunteered time and effort to manage popular, important, and critical projects. Many of them are burned out.
This issue came into the public’s consciousness 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 three hundred million dollars last year largely from corporate sponsors, doles out grants to select projects through its Alpha-Omega Project. In 2025, Alpha-Omega issued five point eight million dollars to fourteen projects.
Some projects take donations directly from corporate donors. In January, for instance, Anthropic donated one point five million dollars to the Python Software Foundation. While the Foundation was thrilled to have that cash, Anthropic itself raised thirty billion dollars that same month, making such a donation 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 significant discussion last year in the Ruby community surrounding some long-time maintainers leaving and its big sponsor Spotify.
The Open Source Endowment hopes to support projects while displacing such risks. Vinogradov says the only way to support open source sustainably is with private funds. He explains that endowments require patience. 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.