On the subject of funding, does anybody know of any organizations that fund younger/newer projects? Most that I know of only focus on established/large projects.
nlnet is the only exception I know of as I got funding from them in the past, but at least in the context of programming languages they clearly stated they're not particularly interested in funding them because there are so many, with my case being an exception because I asked for so little.
In Germany, we have the Protoype Fund, that explicitly aims at new open source projects. (All team members receiving funding must be EU residents, with at least one of them in Germany.)
So you must use a closed source code forge to apply for open source funding? And then claim “no corporate projects”? How do you earnestly square this circle?
Free money versus some money in trade for, let's be honest, pretty minimal constraints on governance on the project side? If I was going to give you money, even a small amount, to keep your project alive for the foreseeable future. I would want that money used prudently and pragmatically. Spending money on hosting your own OSS forge, CI servers, etc... though it might feel morally like the right thing to do, financially, isn't as pragmatic.
People make OSS work, and the axial point where the most impact of funding in OSS will make sense is to ensure that the people who are building and maintaining a project have funds to support themselves and the work. Github is free (monetarily), including up to certain amounts of CI action minutes and other features. From an administrative perspective, it's also easier to review the portfolio of projects you're funding if they're all on one platform (at least at the beginning).
I don't think that constraint comes from a bad place (i.e. some hidden commercial agenda), I think they're declaring their interest subtly here. They're not interested in funding projects / people who are going to blow money on something that if they were interested in long-term longevity, they could be getting for free as a cost-saving measure in support of longevity. I would rather you paid people a bit more money than shell out 50-100/mo of the money on a server to do something you could be doing for free. It's pragmatism, not ideology here I think.
I don't have any skin in this game, as in I'm not affiliated with the fund. But I am excited about it, and the long-term possibility. I've even talked about setting something up similar in other comments here on lobste.rs.
Other platforms are free as in both freedom & beer (or paid, but not a publicly-traded company with shareholders to appease, US sanctions to comply with, or will take your project down when another corporation doesn’t like it (see: youtube-dl & the Switch emulators)). There are a lot of other options that could have been pick or a multiple of them, and self-hosting should still be an option for maximum freedom (don’t even make Git the requirement). The endowment has been called out in enough places online that they are starting to back down this stance since it doesn’t align the with the broader goals of free & open source software to be requiring proprietary tools to play. It’s bad enough SEO & LLMs will prefer prioritize the platform, projects are often stuck in a sense that they can’t migrate out, social pressure about “network effects”… we don’t need to be willingly adding more cards in Microsoft’s hands & furthering lock-in—this is a great opportunity to go against the status quo, & with $$$ which normally the FOSS space lacks. The devil doesn’t need advocacy here.
That's a tricky one for me to really weigh in on, all my experience is in the research domain, which doesn't have so much of a standing or inter-mingling of concepts of "freedom" with concepts of licensing.
I don't particularly like github either, i'm not defending the choice of platform itself. But I think you do have to differentiate between concepts of "freedom" and what are licensing concepts (OSS licensing models). The endowment didn't state it's there to fund your freedom to do what whatever you want. A grant is a contract between two entities that one will provide money and they can layer constraints in there that they feel ensure that the money is being used appropriately and that it won't be used in ways that are antithetical to protecting it's reputation and the endowment. There is usually a legal requirement to protect the funds as a charity and to be accountable for their use. If they fund an OSS maintainer, and that maintainer ends up treating the community and individual people poorly (for example) or are abusive, that reflects back on the endowment as a funder, and could result in litigation which jeopardizes the endowment. If they indirectly fund a project which breaks copyright law, it could result in litigation against the charity. They may just be piggy-backing on githubs controls around those things as a protection mechanism for the fund.
Out of curiosity (not trying to catch you out; I am legitimately curious where the lines is) would you be just as upset if they stated that if you're an open source project that you need to have a system of governance in place to adequately handle instances of "bad behaviour" like racism, sexism in your projects day to day? Or that you have a zero tolerance approach to those things? That also technically impinges on your freedom by imposing patterns of behaviour on you and your community?
Those things are not good, but they can largely be resolved in a community by a community—we are all peer & that’s why you see different forms of Codes of Conducts put out (or not put out as i different kind of stance). That’s a community you could choose not to be a part of… which is different than a platform controlled capital where there is some ability to self-police, but if you do something like such as a make a Switch emulator (there were 2 I think) in the open but kicked vs. support domestic terrorism (ICE) allowed to stay, Microsoft/GitHub’s stance is going align with those with capital & those with force (who serve those with capital). I truly believe that this is the bigger picture about anti-“woke-ism”/DEI from one side or inclusion-ism/safe-spaces on the other side or whatever bogeymen ‘they’ put out is a distraction so to get us to fight each other instead of pointing the pitchforks at those holding all the cards in this economy. Microsoft sat on the “it’s free code hosting” until they realized they could finally turn that into the profit of selling Copilot back to us—trained on all of our data/labor (& no not all of it is “freely available”)—not just as a tool but it seems largely to replace most developers. Or giving out “free donations” as a one-time publicity stunt to get more share of developers adding the branded .github folder to collect a tithe on all open source transactions. This happening while the service itself continues to degrade (downtime, Actions glitches, Copilot shilling, “feeds”, etc.). This is is a different beast—the same beast that if you don’t like what Uber did to the world by creating monopolies, or Reddit, or Facebook, you would rightfully feel the same way about this platform specifically (which is also social media trying to garner engagement & time on the platform).
Even with GitLab, not my first choice, being publicly traded in the US… at least the core product is open, they model on remote work for freedom, open tickets (instead of a forum to beg for features with no status), & at least try to give developer happiness balance to purely profit—which has never been Microsoft’s MO (which is why the philosophic purists for free/open source left in 2016 & have been encouraging folks on these same lines). But even they support basically the entire same feature set so it’s untrue to say the Microsoft offering offers fundamentally anything unique beyond “the network effect” that they specifically bought. Ideally you wouldn’t bless just one forge/platform for it would have too much power & limitation (Git & merge request workflows are not going to be dominant forever for instance)—but specifically buying is upholding hegemony for a megacorporation, most non-business folks tend to have a bad taste towards if not in 2016, by 2026.
The folks at this endowment know choosing the Microsoft platform it doesn’t align with the philosophy they are trying to be philanthropic toward. You can also compare it NLnet (EU) as already doing this long-term offering plain “Website / wiki” on their form. You always check out what competitors/rivals or even allies are doing in the space as a barometer, but this endowment took a myopic, careless shortcut—which is why they are realizing, “yeah, we gotta fix this”.
Disclaimer: I'm one of the initial donors, but have had no real input on anything besides that. I don't speak for the foundation.
I've been in contact with the founding group of this non-profit for over a year now. They've been diligently and thoughtfully working on this, on the side (they all have their own careers), for a very long time.
It is incredibly rude and mean to write a dismissive comment based on extremely superficial things; a determination you probably made in minutes while the group behind this (not the donors like me, but the actual people doing work) have poured hundreds of hours into this.
Re: the neutrality note. That is an ideal they've been working really hard to strive for. It's pretty impossible to make something like this fully objective, of course, but to the end they can, they've been working on a totally transparent system on how projects get funded. I don't know if they published that today, but it's worth looking at. I have my own criticisms about it, its absolutely not perfect, but I trust the board to continue doing the right thing.
I think on the whole, an endowment model is not going to work for most OSS. I've personally been pretty public about my feelings on OSS funding and sustainability. But, I do think we should try everything we can, and that an endowment model will work for a small slice of OSS out there that don't have other options. So, despite that, I'm one of the major initial donors (the largest?).
I'm not going to let perfect be the enemy of good. I'd rather try and fail than not try at all. The people behind this are doing something, not just talking about it, but actually doing it. That's better than 99% of people (probably with a few decimals of 9s added).
We need diversity of funding sources to fit the diversity of the tech being produced.
I could go on about the background of some of these individuals (which are stellar), but I don't think thats even that important for the point I'm trying to make here. I simply think that the "good is not good enough" negativity paired with superficial dismissals are exhausting.
(Btw, I'm not defensive at all about this due to my financial involvement. I would've said the exact same thing if I donated $0 and knew the people/process behind it. Non-profit work isn't an investment, I get no returns, I make an educated determination on the impact of what I can provide financially and hope for the best.)
I think on the whole, an endowment model is not going to work for most OSS.
to
We need diversity of funding sources to fit the diversity of the tech being produced.
You are 100% correct. I think people need to stop thinking that a single model is going to solve it all. Resilience comes from diversity in any "system", the applications we build rely on a diverse ecosystem of libraries and packages, why shouldn't the support and funding model as well? If we want to support OSS, there needs to be multiple different avenues that are supporting initiatives and maintainers.
The web site feels honestly eerily modeled on the org I work for which is one of the largest in the world in it's domain. But that is no bad thing. A lot of major health breakthroughs in the last decade have been funded in part or in whole by the org I work for. And being firmly embedded in the org, I can say that everyone is invested in the research community from highest positions and board down to the people who service the building.
These things also take time, and a long-term, "seven generations" kind of outlook like an endowment is a good thing to have in order to balance long-term goals against short-term shoring up of the system. If you invest prudently and protect the endowment, then longer-term you can get to a place where you actually have more money than there is funding need out there and innovation starts to happen through discovery grants with wide remits, and you can target specific verticals that are historically under-served in OSS, and you can slowly influence the OSS ecosystem towards things like better equality, ethical standards, and more.
My org started with a few thousand dollars and a constitution, it's now at close to 40 billion and we're aiming to spend 1.9 billion of that over the next couple years on science and making peoples lives better. There's no reason why OSS can't follow a similar model.
The organisation I work for has been operating with the same statement of non-political, non-corporate influence for about 90 years without fail, in the scientific research domain. You will have to interact with political functions in various countries, and there will be attempts by corporations to influence things, but as long as the organisation is set up properly, and there's a concrete constitution, protection of the endowment is baked into it hard, and there are few avenues for major power grabs, with appropriate checks and balances, it can work.
I'm a bit torn between "sounds good" and "a bit too much medieval patronage of the arts".
Maybe it's because my alma mater is (mostly?) financed by the state, thus by taxes, and it's fine.
Call me your average European socialist if you must, but I prefer that model to whatever I heard about the US endowment model for universities, even if they're swimming in money, by comparison, and yet people still ruin themselves by studying there.
That said, maybe it's an acceptable tradeoff if valuable projects get some money, but (as I have often enough said here), I am not sold on the model of maintainers making a living off of donations.
If the direction is more of a grant-making operation versus firing off donations to individual teams then you can side-step the whole "living off donations" bit and push the ecosystem more towards a grants-based approach where you can apply for funding and get funding to keep your project running over longer periods of time.
State-backed funding is a part of a diverse portfolio that supports education and research in your country more than likely. An endowment is an endowment, whether it's a university-oriented one or one like this, yes. There are rules and regulations around how that money is managed. The defining difference is in the constitution or rules that were put into place at the inception of the trust/charity.
Like I commented further up, success in these things comes from a diverse portfolio of funding avenues. That can include state-backed funding, and an organisation like this could effectively in the long-term get states to come to the table more firmly in order to contribute to supporting OSS and related initiatives.
Scientific research is currently surviving because of diversification, globally we didn't 100% rely on US-backed grants and funding, so when those things started to collapse in recent years for various reasons, the rest of the ecosystem of funding has been slowly picking up the slack.
I'm actually really excited about seeing this happening! I don't think it will solve every problem, and it's not a single solution to a large problem, it's another foundational piece in a diverse estate of solutions that need to be built up around OSS being a "public good".
I mean I agree insofar that (and that's maybe a personal problem) I'd have much less of a problem asking for a grant to provide a market-competitive salary from such a fund over soliciting piecemeal donations off of individuals. The diversification makes sense, but for me also the order "money is there, then gets spent" is important vs "I need money, please give me money".
One of the things that the applying form does though that's really beneficial is if the maintainer is applying for a not-insignificant amount of money, it requires them to have a higher amount of accountability for the use of those funds. For example, line budgeting what the funds will be used for, staffing costs, etc... which forms a basis for the funder to not just throw money at it, but also expertise in ensuring that your project plans appropriately for the long-term using the funds. That doesn't happen if you just throw money at people, the requirement for applying means you have a minimum threshold of planning and management in place before the money gets released. That's generally beneficial because not everyone has great business acumen, and if you're hyper-focused on engineering and development you might not be thinking about those things as deeply as you should be if you're aiming for longevity of your project.
So I live full time off work on an open-source project. Between private donations and grants, I haven't set foot in an office since 2023, and probably won't for several years even if money dries up. This isn't a brag, but context for where the rest of the post is coming from.
Efforts like these are good, but my sense is that the real obstacle to funding for most open source projects is just getting better at asking for money. This involves putting yourself out there, being upfront about wanting money. This is awkward and uncomfortable, especially at first.
It's just not enough to have a paypal link three quarters down into the FAQ. On a scale of what the average project is doing now, and those annoying Jimmy Wales puppy eyed e-begging banners, the ideal only in terms of getting money is probably pretty close to to what Jimbo is doing, though I'd personally tone it down a bit.
If you've built something widely used that not a lot of people see, like the metaphorical libcurl holding up the entire internet, reaching out to businesses and seeking corporate sponsorship is usually the best idea.
The best in any circumstance is talking to some rich person or organization directly. The upside is that the people who are typically good at asking for funding are charlatans, idea guys, smooth talkers. Showing up and being able to actually walk the talk, having to something to show that isn't just promises and lofty ideas puts you miles ahead of the pack, even if it's just a working demo.
I keep replying to comments in here, domineering a bit, but for once i've found myself uniquely in a position to comment on what the future of something like this might look like...
The problem you're describing, is a known problem in multiple different funding domains. On the other side of it, in our case (research funding), we actually struggle to find research to fund in some verticals. People just aren't applying in sufficient numbers to reach our spend goals in certain verticals. Part of that is outreach, marketing and exposure.
The research funding landscape is geared towards researchers seeking funding, maybe there's something to take from that model (it has it's drawbacks though; high barriers and time commitment for the application side of things), but it's a core part of the ecosystems that you are expected to go out, apply at different funders / institutions and make the case for what you're going to use that money for.
A part of the way that we address wider ecosystem funding, or getting money to areas we don't have high visibility in, is through regranting through other orgs that are dominant in those spaces. So we'll give a tranche of money to an org that funds genomics, and then they handle allocating that money because they have better tendrils and connections into that research domain and a better understanding where the money will make the highest impact and produce solid outcomes. Another thing is contract grants, where you identify an area that there's limited research in, and instead of trying to get people to apply for funding in it, you "boostrap" that research area by using contract-based grants to seed the space.
This fund is just starting out, it can only fund so much, but the hope is that it gets to a similar position, but I think on the whole we would need to get to a place where both sides are doing the right things so people know where to go, and people have the tools and avenues to apply.
Probably quite low and subsumed by the core founders at the moment. If they're set up correctly, they'll have a strong remit to protect the endowment at all costs. In general the founding members would be set up in such a way that they don't have a major cash incentive in it. They're not there to make money, removing the remuneration incentive means they can think clearly about whats best for the fund, and not about what will line their pockets better. You don't put your money into something like this expecting massive returns, it's not an investment for you, it's an investment for the ecosystem and the endowment holds it in trust to insure the future of that ecosystem.
What will generally happen in these situations is if the organisation is set up as a charity, as the endowment grows through investments, they'll likely set up (or have set up) a commercial subsidiary owned by the higher-level trust. That has to happen because there are certain things that trusts/charitable organisations cannot do legally. So you need a commercial arm to manage those things and you need to staff that commercial arm. If you've invested prudently up to that point, the commercial component doesn't need to turn a profit, it's just there as a vehicle for the endowment to do the things it can't do directly.
As you scale you'll need things like grant management platforms, payment processing teams, HR / people teams, etc... which means purchasing commercial software, etc... you might want insight into the portfolio of funding so you'll need data engineers, analysts. There are also higher reporting requirements for charities around their finances, so you'll need competent finance people, etc... all of that generally will fall into the commercial arm which gets funded by the endowment. That's a model, not sure if it's their model, but there are well established ways of doing these things that do work.
Notwithstanding the foregoing, in the first twelve (12) years since the incorporation, no act of the Board may be approved without the non-negative vote of the Founding Director, if his seat is held on the date of voting.
It seems to me that it means that the board is in practice advisory (because no action can be taken without the founding director’s assent) for over a decade. I’m not at all opposed to the founding director retaining control for a period of time in order to preserve the vision of the organisation, but twelve years are a long time. Is this a normal provision?
I would have been tempted to give him, say, a dozen extra votes, and remove one vote each year.
Welp I'm insta-ruled-out for having started a business to support my open source work. That business is of course the only way I can still afford to eat on a day to day basis while continuing to spend my time on OSS.
I remember reading a fascinating article about Phillip Glass, who in addition to being a passionate maker of music also did mundane work like installing dishwashers in people's homes. For working he was excluded from most funding for the arts. But it never stopped him from making his music!
yorickpeterse | a day ago
On the subject of funding, does anybody know of any organizations that fund younger/newer projects? Most that I know of only focus on established/large projects.
nlnet is the only exception I know of as I got funding from them in the past, but at least in the context of programming languages they clearly stated they're not particularly interested in funding them because there are so many, with my case being an exception because I asked for so little.
blinry | 5 hours ago
In Germany, we have the Protoype Fund, that explicitly aims at new open source projects. (All team members receiving funding must be EU residents, with at least one of them in Germany.)
yorickpeterse | 2 hours ago
This sounds interesting, shame it's specific to Germany :/
toastal | 19 hours ago
So you must use a closed source code forge to apply for open source funding? And then claim “no corporate projects”? How do you earnestly square this circle?
objectif_lune | 13 hours ago
Free money versus some money in trade for, let's be honest, pretty minimal constraints on governance on the project side? If I was going to give you money, even a small amount, to keep your project alive for the foreseeable future. I would want that money used prudently and pragmatically. Spending money on hosting your own OSS forge, CI servers, etc... though it might feel morally like the right thing to do, financially, isn't as pragmatic.
People make OSS work, and the axial point where the most impact of funding in OSS will make sense is to ensure that the people who are building and maintaining a project have funds to support themselves and the work. Github is free (monetarily), including up to certain amounts of CI action minutes and other features. From an administrative perspective, it's also easier to review the portfolio of projects you're funding if they're all on one platform (at least at the beginning).
I don't think that constraint comes from a bad place (i.e. some hidden commercial agenda), I think they're declaring their interest subtly here. They're not interested in funding projects / people who are going to blow money on something that if they were interested in long-term longevity, they could be getting for free as a cost-saving measure in support of longevity. I would rather you paid people a bit more money than shell out 50-100/mo of the money on a server to do something you could be doing for free. It's pragmatism, not ideology here I think.
I don't have any skin in this game, as in I'm not affiliated with the fund. But I am excited about it, and the long-term possibility. I've even talked about setting something up similar in other comments here on lobste.rs.
toastal | 11 hours ago
Other platforms are free as in both freedom & beer (or paid, but not a publicly-traded company with shareholders to appease, US sanctions to comply with, or will take your project down when another corporation doesn’t like it (see: youtube-dl & the Switch emulators)). There are a lot of other options that could have been pick or a multiple of them, and self-hosting should still be an option for maximum freedom (don’t even make Git the requirement). The endowment has been called out in enough places online that they are starting to back down this stance since it doesn’t align the with the broader goals of free & open source software to be requiring proprietary tools to play. It’s bad enough SEO & LLMs will prefer prioritize the platform, projects are often stuck in a sense that they can’t migrate out, social pressure about “network effects”… we don’t need to be willingly adding more cards in Microsoft’s hands & furthering lock-in—this is a great opportunity to go against the status quo, & with $$$ which normally the FOSS space lacks. The devil doesn’t need advocacy here.
objectif_lune | 9 hours ago
That's a tricky one for me to really weigh in on, all my experience is in the research domain, which doesn't have so much of a standing or inter-mingling of concepts of "freedom" with concepts of licensing.
I don't particularly like github either, i'm not defending the choice of platform itself. But I think you do have to differentiate between concepts of "freedom" and what are licensing concepts (OSS licensing models). The endowment didn't state it's there to fund your freedom to do what whatever you want. A grant is a contract between two entities that one will provide money and they can layer constraints in there that they feel ensure that the money is being used appropriately and that it won't be used in ways that are antithetical to protecting it's reputation and the endowment. There is usually a legal requirement to protect the funds as a charity and to be accountable for their use. If they fund an OSS maintainer, and that maintainer ends up treating the community and individual people poorly (for example) or are abusive, that reflects back on the endowment as a funder, and could result in litigation which jeopardizes the endowment. If they indirectly fund a project which breaks copyright law, it could result in litigation against the charity. They may just be piggy-backing on githubs controls around those things as a protection mechanism for the fund.
Out of curiosity (not trying to catch you out; I am legitimately curious where the lines is) would you be just as upset if they stated that if you're an open source project that you need to have a system of governance in place to adequately handle instances of "bad behaviour" like racism, sexism in your projects day to day? Or that you have a zero tolerance approach to those things? That also technically impinges on your freedom by imposing patterns of behaviour on you and your community?
toastal | 7 hours ago
Those things are not good, but they can largely be resolved in a community by a community—we are all peer & that’s why you see different forms of Codes of Conducts put out (or not put out as i different kind of stance). That’s a community you could choose not to be a part of… which is different than a platform controlled capital where there is some ability to self-police, but if you do something like such as a make a Switch emulator (there were 2 I think) in the open but kicked vs. support domestic terrorism (ICE) allowed to stay, Microsoft/GitHub’s stance is going align with those with capital & those with force (who serve those with capital). I truly believe that this is the bigger picture about anti-“woke-ism”/DEI from one side or inclusion-ism/safe-spaces on the other side or whatever bogeymen ‘they’ put out is a distraction so to get us to fight each other instead of pointing the pitchforks at those holding all the cards in this economy. Microsoft sat on the “it’s free code hosting” until they realized they could finally turn that into the profit of selling Copilot back to us—trained on all of our data/labor (& no not all of it is “freely available”)—not just as a tool but it seems largely to replace most developers. Or giving out “free donations” as a one-time publicity stunt to get more share of developers adding the branded
.githubfolder to collect a tithe on all open source transactions. This happening while the service itself continues to degrade (downtime, Actions glitches, Copilot shilling, “feeds”, etc.). This is is a different beast—the same beast that if you don’t like what Uber did to the world by creating monopolies, or Reddit, or Facebook, you would rightfully feel the same way about this platform specifically (which is also social media trying to garner engagement & time on the platform).Even with GitLab, not my first choice, being publicly traded in the US… at least the core product is open, they model on remote work for freedom, open tickets (instead of a forum to beg for features with no status), & at least try to give developer happiness balance to purely profit—which has never been Microsoft’s MO (which is why the philosophic purists for free/open source left in 2016 & have been encouraging folks on these same lines). But even they support basically the entire same feature set so it’s untrue to say the Microsoft offering offers fundamentally anything unique beyond “the network effect” that they specifically bought. Ideally you wouldn’t bless just one forge/platform for it would have too much power & limitation (Git & merge request workflows are not going to be dominant forever for instance)—but specifically buying is upholding hegemony for a megacorporation, most non-business folks tend to have a bad taste towards if not in 2016, by 2026.
The folks at this endowment know choosing the Microsoft platform it doesn’t align with the philosophy they are trying to be philanthropic toward. You can also compare it NLnet (EU) as already doing this long-term offering plain “Website / wiki” on their form. You always check out what competitors/rivals or even allies are doing in the space as a barometer, but this endowment took a myopic, careless shortcut—which is why they are realizing, “yeah, we gotta fix this”.
sjamaan | 9 hours ago
FedericoSchonborn | a day ago
The site reads like AI slop, most of the commits are co-"authored" by Claude (which, looking at the founding donors, does not surprise me).
Ping me in a few months when the drama inevitably starts.
mitchellh | 21 hours ago
Disclaimer: I'm one of the initial donors, but have had no real input on anything besides that. I don't speak for the foundation.
I've been in contact with the founding group of this non-profit for over a year now. They've been diligently and thoughtfully working on this, on the side (they all have their own careers), for a very long time.
It is incredibly rude and mean to write a dismissive comment based on extremely superficial things; a determination you probably made in minutes while the group behind this (not the donors like me, but the actual people doing work) have poured hundreds of hours into this.
Re: the neutrality note. That is an ideal they've been working really hard to strive for. It's pretty impossible to make something like this fully objective, of course, but to the end they can, they've been working on a totally transparent system on how projects get funded. I don't know if they published that today, but it's worth looking at. I have my own criticisms about it, its absolutely not perfect, but I trust the board to continue doing the right thing.
I think on the whole, an endowment model is not going to work for most OSS. I've personally been pretty public about my feelings on OSS funding and sustainability. But, I do think we should try everything we can, and that an endowment model will work for a small slice of OSS out there that don't have other options. So, despite that, I'm one of the major initial donors (the largest?).
I'm not going to let perfect be the enemy of good. I'd rather try and fail than not try at all. The people behind this are doing something, not just talking about it, but actually doing it. That's better than 99% of people (probably with a few decimals of 9s added).
We need diversity of funding sources to fit the diversity of the tech being produced.
I could go on about the background of some of these individuals (which are stellar), but I don't think thats even that important for the point I'm trying to make here. I simply think that the "good is not good enough" negativity paired with superficial dismissals are exhausting.
(Btw, I'm not defensive at all about this due to my financial involvement. I would've said the exact same thing if I donated $0 and knew the people/process behind it. Non-profit work isn't an investment, I get no returns, I make an educated determination on the impact of what I can provide financially and hope for the best.)
objectif_lune | 14 hours ago
to
You are 100% correct. I think people need to stop thinking that a single model is going to solve it all. Resilience comes from diversity in any "system", the applications we build rely on a diverse ecosystem of libraries and packages, why shouldn't the support and funding model as well? If we want to support OSS, there needs to be multiple different avenues that are supporting initiatives and maintainers.
The web site feels honestly eerily modeled on the org I work for which is one of the largest in the world in it's domain. But that is no bad thing. A lot of major health breakthroughs in the last decade have been funded in part or in whole by the org I work for. And being firmly embedded in the org, I can say that everyone is invested in the research community from highest positions and board down to the people who service the building.
These things also take time, and a long-term, "seven generations" kind of outlook like an endowment is a good thing to have in order to balance long-term goals against short-term shoring up of the system. If you invest prudently and protect the endowment, then longer-term you can get to a place where you actually have more money than there is funding need out there and innovation starts to happen through discovery grants with wide remits, and you can target specific verticals that are historically under-served in OSS, and you can slowly influence the OSS ecosystem towards things like better equality, ethical standards, and more.
My org started with a few thousand dollars and a constitution, it's now at close to 40 billion and we're aiming to spend 1.9 billion of that over the next couple years on science and making peoples lives better. There's no reason why OSS can't follow a similar model.
objectif_lune | 14 hours ago
The organisation I work for has been operating with the same statement of non-political, non-corporate influence for about 90 years without fail, in the scientific research domain. You will have to interact with political functions in various countries, and there will be attempts by corporations to influence things, but as long as the organisation is set up properly, and there's a concrete constitution, protection of the endowment is baked into it hard, and there are few avenues for major power grabs, with appropriate checks and balances, it can work.
wink | 14 hours ago
I'm a bit torn between "sounds good" and "a bit too much medieval patronage of the arts".
Maybe it's because my alma mater is (mostly?) financed by the state, thus by taxes, and it's fine.
Call me your average European socialist if you must, but I prefer that model to whatever I heard about the US endowment model for universities, even if they're swimming in money, by comparison, and yet people still ruin themselves by studying there.
That said, maybe it's an acceptable tradeoff if valuable projects get some money, but (as I have often enough said here), I am not sold on the model of maintainers making a living off of donations.
objectif_lune | 14 hours ago
If the direction is more of a grant-making operation versus firing off donations to individual teams then you can side-step the whole "living off donations" bit and push the ecosystem more towards a grants-based approach where you can apply for funding and get funding to keep your project running over longer periods of time.
State-backed funding is a part of a diverse portfolio that supports education and research in your country more than likely. An endowment is an endowment, whether it's a university-oriented one or one like this, yes. There are rules and regulations around how that money is managed. The defining difference is in the constitution or rules that were put into place at the inception of the trust/charity.
Like I commented further up, success in these things comes from a diverse portfolio of funding avenues. That can include state-backed funding, and an organisation like this could effectively in the long-term get states to come to the table more firmly in order to contribute to supporting OSS and related initiatives.
Scientific research is currently surviving because of diversification, globally we didn't 100% rely on US-backed grants and funding, so when those things started to collapse in recent years for various reasons, the rest of the ecosystem of funding has been slowly picking up the slack.
I'm actually really excited about seeing this happening! I don't think it will solve every problem, and it's not a single solution to a large problem, it's another foundational piece in a diverse estate of solutions that need to be built up around OSS being a "public good".
wink | 10 hours ago
I mean I agree insofar that (and that's maybe a personal problem) I'd have much less of a problem asking for a grant to provide a market-competitive salary from such a fund over soliciting piecemeal donations off of individuals. The diversification makes sense, but for me also the order "money is there, then gets spent" is important vs "I need money, please give me money".
objectif_lune | 9 hours ago
One of the things that the applying form does though that's really beneficial is if the maintainer is applying for a not-insignificant amount of money, it requires them to have a higher amount of accountability for the use of those funds. For example, line budgeting what the funds will be used for, staffing costs, etc... which forms a basis for the funder to not just throw money at it, but also expertise in ensuring that your project plans appropriately for the long-term using the funds. That doesn't happen if you just throw money at people, the requirement for applying means you have a minimum threshold of planning and management in place before the money gets released. That's generally beneficial because not everyone has great business acumen, and if you're hyper-focused on engineering and development you might not be thinking about those things as deeply as you should be if you're aiming for longevity of your project.
marginalia | 11 hours ago
So I live full time off work on an open-source project. Between private donations and grants, I haven't set foot in an office since 2023, and probably won't for several years even if money dries up. This isn't a brag, but context for where the rest of the post is coming from.
Efforts like these are good, but my sense is that the real obstacle to funding for most open source projects is just getting better at asking for money. This involves putting yourself out there, being upfront about wanting money. This is awkward and uncomfortable, especially at first.
It's just not enough to have a paypal link three quarters down into the FAQ. On a scale of what the average project is doing now, and those annoying Jimmy Wales puppy eyed e-begging banners, the ideal only in terms of getting money is probably pretty close to to what Jimbo is doing, though I'd personally tone it down a bit.
If you've built something widely used that not a lot of people see, like the metaphorical libcurl holding up the entire internet, reaching out to businesses and seeking corporate sponsorship is usually the best idea.
The best in any circumstance is talking to some rich person or organization directly. The upside is that the people who are typically good at asking for funding are charlatans, idea guys, smooth talkers. Showing up and being able to actually walk the talk, having to something to show that isn't just promises and lofty ideas puts you miles ahead of the pack, even if it's just a working demo.
objectif_lune | 11 hours ago
I keep replying to comments in here, domineering a bit, but for once i've found myself uniquely in a position to comment on what the future of something like this might look like...
The problem you're describing, is a known problem in multiple different funding domains. On the other side of it, in our case (research funding), we actually struggle to find research to fund in some verticals. People just aren't applying in sufficient numbers to reach our spend goals in certain verticals. Part of that is outreach, marketing and exposure.
The research funding landscape is geared towards researchers seeking funding, maybe there's something to take from that model (it has it's drawbacks though; high barriers and time commitment for the application side of things), but it's a core part of the ecosystems that you are expected to go out, apply at different funders / institutions and make the case for what you're going to use that money for.
A part of the way that we address wider ecosystem funding, or getting money to areas we don't have high visibility in, is through regranting through other orgs that are dominant in those spaces. So we'll give a tranche of money to an org that funds genomics, and then they handle allocating that money because they have better tendrils and connections into that research domain and a better understanding where the money will make the highest impact and produce solid outcomes. Another thing is contract grants, where you identify an area that there's limited research in, and instead of trying to get people to apply for funding in it, you "boostrap" that research area by using contract-based grants to seed the space.
This fund is just starting out, it can only fund so much, but the hope is that it gets to a similar position, but I think on the whole we would need to get to a place where both sides are doing the right things so people know where to go, and people have the tools and avenues to apply.
jaredkrinke | a day ago
If I’m reading correctly, they have around $700k and they’re planing to distribute 5% ($35k) per year. I like the concept of an open source endowment.
But what are their expenses/overhead? I can’t find any information about that.
objectif_lune | 14 hours ago
Probably quite low and subsumed by the core founders at the moment. If they're set up correctly, they'll have a strong remit to protect the endowment at all costs. In general the founding members would be set up in such a way that they don't have a major cash incentive in it. They're not there to make money, removing the remuneration incentive means they can think clearly about whats best for the fund, and not about what will line their pockets better. You don't put your money into something like this expecting massive returns, it's not an investment for you, it's an investment for the ecosystem and the endowment holds it in trust to insure the future of that ecosystem.
What will generally happen in these situations is if the organisation is set up as a charity, as the endowment grows through investments, they'll likely set up (or have set up) a commercial subsidiary owned by the higher-level trust. That has to happen because there are certain things that trusts/charitable organisations cannot do legally. So you need a commercial arm to manage those things and you need to staff that commercial arm. If you've invested prudently up to that point, the commercial component doesn't need to turn a profit, it's just there as a vehicle for the endowment to do the things it can't do directly.
As you scale you'll need things like grant management platforms, payment processing teams, HR / people teams, etc... which means purchasing commercial software, etc... you might want insight into the portfolio of funding so you'll need data engineers, analysts. There are also higher reporting requirements for charities around their finances, so you'll need competent finance people, etc... all of that generally will fall into the commercial arm which gets funded by the endowment. That's a model, not sure if it's their model, but there are well established ways of doing these things that do work.
rau | 10 hours ago
It looks like an excellent, awesome idea. I do have a reservation about this provision of the https://endowment.dev/docs/bylaws/:
It seems to me that it means that the board is in practice advisory (because no action can be taken without the founding director’s assent) for over a decade. I’m not at all opposed to the founding director retaining control for a period of time in order to preserve the vision of the organisation, but twelve years are a long time. Is this a normal provision?
I would have been tempted to give him, say, a dozen extra votes, and remove one vote each year.
conartist6 | 11 hours ago
Welp I'm insta-ruled-out for having started a business to support my open source work. That business is of course the only way I can still afford to eat on a day to day basis while continuing to spend my time on OSS.
I remember reading a fascinating article about Phillip Glass, who in addition to being a passionate maker of music also did mundane work like installing dishwashers in people's homes. For working he was excluded from most funding for the arts. But it never stopped him from making his music!
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-blue-collar-jobs-of-philip-glass