The Open Source Endowment, a new nonprofit, aims to bring a university-style endowment model to open source by providing long-term, investment-backed funding for widely used but under-resourced FOSS projects.
As a US 501(c)(3) public charity, the organization invests donations to create a permanent capital base. Only annual investment returns are distributed as grants, while the principal remains intact to ensure ongoing funding. This approach mirrors how academic institutions use endowments to finance operations.
The initiative addresses the FOSS ecosystem where critical infrastructure components, such as libraries, language runtimes, packaging systems, and networking tools, support global technology stacks but often depend on small teams or individual maintainers. While foundations and corporate sponsors offer some support, funding remains inconsistent and often tied to short-term business goals.
A notable aspect of the launch is its donor base. The Community page lists about 60 individual and institutional supporters, with publicly disclosed contribution tiers. Individuals who contribute $1,000 or more annually qualify as members with advisory and governance participation rights.
Some of the notable donors include Mitchell Hashimoto (Co-founder, HashiCorp), Igor Sysoev (Co-founder, Nginx), Evan You (Vue.js creator), Daniel Stenberg (Curl Founder), and Chris Aniszczyk (CTO, Linux Foundation). Institutional supporters include G Research and Evil Martians.
The organization states that project funding will follow a nomination and evaluation process using a “Value–Risk” framework to assess ecosystem impact, security exposure, and maintainer capacity. The first grant round is planned for Q2 2026, with no funded projects announced yet.
The governance structure includes a board and executive leadership, with donor-members involved in strategic guidance and funding discussions. The endowment positions itself as independent and neutral, with a mandate to support critical open source components regardless of vendor alignment.
Finally, OSE states it will support only nonprofit projects and excludes VC-backed startups or projects with direct corporate ownership. Funding may be forward-looking, tied to defined improvements such as onboarding co-maintainers or addressing structural vulnerabilities, or backward-looking, recognizing maintainers who have sustained critical infrastructure for years without adequate support.
For more information, see this post.
