Congratulations to the Open Source Endowment (OSE) on their public launch.
OSE brings the endowment model to bear on the problem of Open Source sustainability. What is the endowment model? It’s the main way universities and other cultural institutions fund their work. For example, Harvard has amassed an endowment of $57 billion over the centuries, and they fund their year-to-year activities from the interest (taking operational costs and inflation into account, of course). Endowments are a well-trodden path. It’s high time to bring the model to Open Source.
How does the Endowment relate to the Pledge? They are complementary. Pledge companies directly pay maintainers. Endowment members are generally individuals investing broadly in the long-term future of the Open Source ecosystem. It’s like alumni from a university giving back—where successful software engineers, and especially technical founders of successful companies, are the alums.
Full disclosure: I am on the founding board of OSE, and Open Source Pledge maintainer Vlad-Stefan Harbuz is an advisor for OSE.
New Models to Address Mounting Pressures
Open Source–adjacent business models continue to face mounting pressure. First it was companies like Amazon undercutting projects like CockroachDB and Elasticsearch. Today, AI provides an even bigger threat, as highlighted in a recent paper, “Vibe Coding Kills Open Source.” There are of course ways in which vibe coding fuels Open Source. That said, AI does insulate developers from the OSS projects they depend on, removing a key channel for business models that subsidize project maintainers.
As it was going to press in January, the paper’s key result proved true. Tailwind's Adam Wathan revealed that traffic to Tailwind's docs website went down by 40%, because people were consulting documentation through LLMs. This meant that potential customers weren't seeing Tailwind's paid offerings, bringing revenues down, and causing them to fire 75% of their engineers.
The vibe coding paper concludes: “The solution is to redesign the business models and institutions that channel value back to OSS maintainers.” Both Pledge and Endowment are doing just that.
Pledge companies have contributed almost $7m to maintainers since our launch. That’s real progress. We look forward to seeing how much further the Open Source Endowment can take us as an industry, and especially how the community will shape its funding allocation model. We encourage all of you software developers to contribute to OSE in proportion to the success that OSS has brought to your career.