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tabbott | 3 days ago

It's an interesting idea. The current endowment size of less than $1M is immaterial; the question with a project like this will always be how it is able to raise capital.

A way something like this could be interesting is if founders started donating 5% of equity when they started a company to an open source foundation like this one.

It doesn't impact the founder much financially: Success is very binary for founders. But in aggregate, if thousands of startup founders do this, there would be some hits and some of those hits could generate a significant endowment.

(You can also try to get people to donate who feel their success was built on top of open source, but I feel that after 10 years building a company to IPO, one's attention as a founder has likely been on business metrics and spending time with business people, not on technology and spending time with technologists, and that shift in attention can reduce people's feeling of gratitude for the amazing inheritance that is open-source software).

discuss

order

kvinogradov|3 days ago

Consider this as a nonprofit startup that has just raised a pre-seed round. The current size of $700K is indeed immaterial, as our plan is to scale it significantly in the coming years.

The closest real-world comparable to what we are building is the Wikimedia Endowment, whose former Director is among OSE’s advisors. Like Wikimedia, we aim to be supported not only by large donations but also by contributions from large community — in our case, 150M+ GitHub users.

Our target audience is diverse - from highly successful founders to everyday developers. The Open Source Endowment is prepared to accept donations in both cash and stock from these groups.

While 5% of equity may be too much, 1% seems achievable. I am personally ready to commit 1% of the carried interest from my own VC fund to the endowment.

kiba|3 days ago

What is a preseed round? You guys don't "make" money when the ROI is primarily about funding long term maintenance of open source projects.

verdverm|3 days ago

Running a non-profit with the mentality of SV, what could go wrong?

Definitely something I will actively avoid after parent comment

mannanj|3 days ago

I'm not an expert here on equity, 5% feels a bit high. I like the idea - even 1% would be significant. In general, could we start to hold accountable and start using public status and tracking of organizational commitment to the open source software they use and make profit off of - that might help a lot as well.

We in general are too naive and fail to hold accountable others and ourselves from contributing back when we use resources from the common public. Open source is like imo the common welfare/public resource. If others are abusing it, its time to call them out for what they are really doing: framing, abusing and stealing from the public and maybe we need to be more serious about this and change the public access (maybe hybrid-open source for companies who use OS software) and create systems to legally enforce these.

whit537|3 days ago

I'll put a plug for the Open Source Pledge here:

https://opensourcepledge.com/members/

The companies listed there have all paid at least $2000/eng on staff/year to OSS maintainers. Real accountability. Endowment accepts corporate donors but is primarily geared towards individuals at this point. Pledge members are all companies. Both/and ... to the OSS moon!