Open Source Endowment aims to raise big pile of money

"Free open source software is fundamentally broken. In 2023, Denis Pushkarev, maintainer of the widely used core-js library, vented his frustration with the fact that users of his software seldom offer financial support, highlighting the disconnect between widespread dependency on open source and inadequate financial compensation for developers maintaining critical infrastructure."

"As OSE points out, 95 percent of codebases rely on open source software, each of which has an average of 500 open source components. And yet 86 percent of open source contributors receive no payment for their work, demonstrating the massive scale of unpaid labor supporting modern software development."

"Two years after the 2014 Heartbleed vulnerability - a dangerous flaw in OpenSSL - a Ford Foundation report noted that the OpenSSL project is critical internet infrastructure yet had just one full-time maintainer and earned less than $2,000 per year in donations, illustrating how severely underfunded essential security infrastructure has been."

Open source software faces significant sustainability challenges despite being fundamental to modern technology infrastructure. The Open Source Endowment represents a new funding approach specifically designed to build and distribute capital to deserving open source projects. While other organizations like Open Collective and the Rust Foundation provide support, OSE focuses on creating a substantial endowment fund. The need is urgent: maintainers of critical projects like core-js and Apache PLC4X have publicly expressed frustration with lack of financial support, and historical incidents like Heartbleed and log4j vulnerabilities exposed how underfunded critical infrastructure projects are. Statistics reveal that 95% of codebases rely on open source components averaging 500 per codebase, yet 86% of contributors work unpaid.

Read at Theregister