Open Source Endowment launches to fund software maintainers

The Open Source Endowment, a new nonprofit organization, has launched to provide sustainable funding for open source maintainers—the developers who work on open source projects, including debugging and feature development. Founded by venture investor Konstantin Vinogradov, the nonprofit has achieved formal 501(c)(3) status (a US tax-exempt nonprofit status) and has raised more than $750,000 in commitments from over 50 donors. If things go according to the plan, Vinogradov aims for the endowment to reach $100 million in assets within seven years.

The initiative addresses a structural vulnerability in how the internet is built. While open source software accounts for up to 55% of the tech stack in organizations, up to 86% of open source developers are not paid for their work. This reliance on unpaid labor has left many maintainers in the community burned out. The fragility of this model was briefly highlighted in 2014 during the OpenSSL Heartbleed disaster, a critical security bug found in an open source security project that was maintained by a single developer but used across the world.

To counter this, the Open Source Endowment is building a fund designed to invest its assets and distribute a fraction of the income annually. The project has secured backing from industry figures, including:

• Thomas Dohmke, who raised $60 million for his dev tool startup;
• Mitchell Hashimoto, founder of HashiCorp, which sold to IBM for $6.4 billion; and
• Paul Copplestone, founder of Supabase.

This endowment model contrasts with existing funding mechanisms, which often rely on corporate sponsorships or direct donations. For example, the Linux Foundation, which brought in about $300 million last year, provides grants through its Alpha-Omega Project. In 2025, Alpha-Omega issued $5.8 million to 14 projects. Other projects receive direct corporate donations, such as Anthropic’s $1.5 million donation to the Python Software Foundation in January—a small fraction of the $30 billion the artificial intelligence company has raised. However, corporate donations can raise concerns about donor influence. “The only way to support open source sustainably is private funds,” says Vinogradov.

Why it matters

The Open Source Endowment aims to provide a permanent, sustainable funding source for open source maintainers. By establishing an investment fund, the nonprofit seeks to address the widespread issues of unpaid labor and developer burnout that threaten the security and stability of the software ecosystem across the world.