A group of prominent open source programmers are teaming up with venture capital investors to launch a nonprofit organization called the Open Source Endowment in hopes of permanently solving the eternal challenge of open source software development: financing.
Open Source Endowment backers include Thomas Dohmke, the former GitHub CEO who raised a record $60 million for development tools startup Entire. Mitchell Hashimoto (founder of HashiCorp, which sold to IBM for $6.4 billion last year); Paul Copplestone, Founder and CEO of Supabase. Co-founder of NGINX. Creator of Vue.js and cURL. Additionally, executives from Elastic, Spotify, and more will be in attendance. Overall, the project has more than 50 donors so far.
The nonprofit just received official 501(c)(3) status and has currently raised more than $750,000 in donations. But if things go according to founder Konstantin Vinogradov’s plans, he will be worth $100 million 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 told TechCrunch, “we have some experience with university endowments,” which are some of the largest investors in venture capital funds.
Vinogradov said that as he scoured the world for open source projects, he kept hearing complaints that “there are no sustainable sources of funding for open source maintainers. This is a really big problem.” (“Maintainer” refers to a developer who works on an open source project, including debugging, selecting and validating features submitted by the community, or programming new features.)
This fund supports projects based on criteria such as the number of users and the number of other projects that depend on that particular software to work. We will also select projects that are not yet well supported by grants, donations, or umbrella organizations such as Alpha-Omega for Linux. Mr. Vinogradov has already formed the nonprofit’s board of directors.
Running out of cash and burning out
Lack of funding in open source is nothing new. Up to 86% of open source developers are not compensated for their work, as open source software is generally free and communities often donate their time and effort freely.
tech crunch event
boston, massachusetts
|
June 9, 2026
This is less of a problem for hobbyists or professional developers who are paid by a company to maintain their projects, but such systems are in a precarious situation. Open source software is the foundation of the Internet, and virtually every large company uses open source tools in some way. In fact, open source software makes up up to 55% of an organization’s technology stack and is present in everything from databases to operating systems.
While it’s certainly possible for open source developers to commercialize free projects and become rich beyond their wildest dreams, the possibility of misquoting The Hunger Games doesn’t do them any favors.
There is, and has been for decades, a core of developers who volunteer their time and effort for free to manage popular, important, and important projects. And many of them burn out.
This issue briefly gained public attention in 2014 with the OpenSSL Heartbleed disaster. In this disaster, a bug was discovered in an open source security project used by much of the Internet and maintained by a single developer.
Many attempts have been made over the years to improve the funding situation. Some projects receive donations from corporate sponsors. For example, the Linux Foundation, which raised about $300 million in funding last year, primarily from corporate sponsors, awards grants to select projects through its Alpha Omega Project. In 2025, Alpha Omega issued $5.8 million to 14 projects.
Some projects receive direct contributions from corporate donors. For example, in January, Anthropic donated $1.5 million to the Python Software Foundation. While the foundation said it was thrilled to get the cash, Anthropic itself also raised $30 billion this month. Such a donation is the equivalent of a couch change to the AI Lab.
Still, not all developers want to accept donations from corporations, due to concerns about giving undue influence to donor companies. For example, The Register reported last year that there was a lot of uproar in the Ruby community over the departure of several long-time maintainers and its big sponsor, Spotify.
Open Source Funds want to support projects while avoiding such risks.
“Private funding is the only way to sustainably support open source,” Vinogradov says.
Why haven’t donations been tried before? Donations require patience, Vinogradov says. They invest much of their wealth and spend only a small portion of their income in any given year, but it takes years, even decades, to grow to meaningful size.
But done right, that perseverance can result in an independent fund that can support important open source projects forever.
Source link
