New endowment hopes to raise a big pile of money for open source projects

Open source projects, ever short of funding, have a potential new source of revenue in the form of the Open Source Endowment (OSE).

The organization describes itself as "the world's first endowment fund for open source software.”

There are certainly other organizations that help fund open source software, such as Open Collective, Open Source Collective, and the Rust Foundation's Maintainers Fund, not to mention organizations like the Software Freedom Conservancy, which provides legal and infrastructure support to open source projects. Open source developers may also be fortunate enough to receive contributions from individuals, companies (when not passing the buck), and government-sponsored initiatives like Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund.

But OSE aspires specifically to build a big pile of cash – an endowment – that it will dole out to deserving open source projects.

It's certainly needed. In 2023, Denis Pushkarev, maintainer of the widely used core-js library, vented his ...