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©(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.
Data-driven grant model. There’s no perfect model for distributing OSS grants. Our approach is an open, measurable, algorithmic (but not automatic) model, […] We’re finalizing the first version of the selection model after the public launch, and its high-level description is at osendowment/model.
The fund invests all donations in a low-risk portfolio and uses only the investment income for grants, making it independent of annual budgets and market volatility. Even a modest $10M fund at this rate would generate ~$500K every year — enough for $10K grants to 50 critical open source projects.
Currently standing at $700k.
Regarding the model:
We aim to focus our support on the core of open-source ecosystems — like ~1% of packages accounting for 99% of downloads and dependencies. Our model shall be a data-driven approximation of the global usage of the open-source supply chain, helping to detect its most critical but underfunded elements.
