A group of notable open source developers team up with a VC investor to launch a non-profit company called Open Source Endowment in hopes of finally solving the perennial issue with open source software development: funding.
Backers of the Open Source Endowment include Thomas Dohmke (the former GitHub CEO who raised a record $60 million for developer tools startup Entire); Mitchell Hashimoto (founder of HashiCorp, which sold to IBM for $6.4 billion last year); Supabase founder and CEO Paul Copplestone. co-founder of NGINX. the creators of Vue.js and cURL. plus executives from Elastic, Spotify and more. In total, the project has over 50 donors so far.
The nonprofit, which just gained official 501(c)(3) status, has currently raised more than $750,000 in pledges. But if things go according to its founder’s plan, Konstantin Vinogradovwill have $100 million in assets within seven years.
Vinogradov is a venture investor specializing in open source software, artificial intelligence and infrastructure and was previously a general partner at Runa Capital. As such, he has “some experience with university endowments,” which are some of the biggest investors in venture capital funds, he told TechCrunch.
Vinogradov says that as he scoured the world for open source projects, one complaint kept coming up: “There’s 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, selecting and verifying features submitted by the community, or planning new features.)
The fund will support projects based on criteria such as their number of users or how many other projects rely on that particular software to function. It will also select projects not already supported by grants, donations or umbrella organizations such as Linux Alpha-Omega. Vinogradov has already put together a board for the nonprofit.
Cash tied up, burned
Lack of money in open source is nothing new. Open source software is usually given away and because the community often contributes time and effort freely, up to 86% of open source developers they are not paid for their work.
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This isn’t much of a problem for hobbyists or professional developers who are paid by their companies to maintain projects, but such a system is on shaky ground. Open source software is the foundation on which the Internet rests, and almost every major company uses open source tools in some way. In fact, open source software accounts up to 55% of the technology stack in organizationsand it exists in everything from databases to operating systems.
While it is certainly possible for open source developers to commercialize their free projects to earn riches 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 it burned.
This issue came into the public 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 receive donations from corporate sponsors. For example, the Linux Foundation, which brought $300 million last year largely from corporate donors, grants grants to selected projects through the Alpha-Omega Project. In 2025, Alpha-Omega issued $5.8 million to 14 projects, it said.
Some projects receive donations directly from corporate donors. In January, for example, Anthropic donated $1.5 million to the Python Software Foundation. While the Foundation said it was excited to have that cash, Anthropic itself raised $30 billion this month. One such donation is the sofa change in the AI lab.
However, not every developer wants to receive corporate donations, as there are concerns about giving sponsoring companies too much influence. For example, last year there was a big uproar in the Ruby community around the departure of some longtime maintainers and major sponsor Shopify, The Register reported.
The Open Source Endowment hopes to support projects while displacing such risks.
“The only way to sustainably support open source is private capital,” says Vinogradov.
Why hasn’t an endowment been tried before? Gifts require patience, says Vinogradov. They invest much of their assets, spending only a fraction of their income in any given year, and take years or even decades to grow to a significant size.
But if done right, this patience will lead to an independent fund that could support critical open source projects forever.
