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.
Definitely something I will actively avoid after parent comment
Ask if those have not changed things, why would a VC run thing make things better? The last 2 decades have shown us what VC centeredness has brought us
That's kind of the point, there are none. The question is why? If people cannot even click a button to support when it's right there...
I don't think people coming out of the VC world are going to fix it, call me cynical if you like
It's seems like a pretty thankless fundraising job but one where having connections to companies, banks and experience with distributing funds comes in handy. What's in it for a VC? I'd assume incoming deal flow and connections to new open source companies.
Seems more promising to me than a technical open source maintainer stepping up to do it on the side. But time will tell.
it looks like there are no direct connections, they are investing, taking fees, and distributing the leftovers
KV ... you gonna take that lying down? :P
> There are many existing projects like this
Also please link, we're not aware of any other endowments exclusively focused on Open Source.
Also, it is not a VC who run things, but the team which consists of people with diverse backgrounds (founders/executives/devs x OSS/nonprofit) and the donor community (which everybody can join): https://endowment.dev/community/
> but have definitely been one of the primary reasons the wealth gap and inequality have risen and continue to rise
That's a pretty big leap you are doing there.
I have /rant'd on YC and the dilution of help to their startups after they stopped heeding their own advice to "do things that don't scale"
Dang, got me beat, too. :) gg
By the way, only 1 out of 6 core team members is based in SV.
Taking capital, using it, taking fees, and then distributing leftovers... sounds like Trumponomics
The README has a 2-3% gap between expected returns and outlays, surely that is not all going to accounting?
I have my own questions yet which I haven't materialized, about the bylaws and selection criteria. But at least they are proposing a new approach.
I'd at least give them a year tryout to see in what it materializes.
At the current state of things I'm a bit in doubts about the market, and how that will change across the year. Though, it would also be interesting, as an idea, to participate in such a process as a member.
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.
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!