> Individuals contributing at least $1,000/year to the endowment fund qualify as OSE Members. Members advise the OSE board on strategic matters, such as the grant-making model, and appoint community-nominated board directors. These rights are legally defined in our membership policy.
https://github.com/osendowment/foundation?tab=readme-ov-file...
The global average salary of a software engineer is $5,906/month, and the OSE membership is $83/month ($1,000/year), so it would require donating ~1.4% of gross income. This aligns fully with the 1-2% of income that an average U.S. individual donates every year, and we are targeting more senior engineers, not the average ones.
So it is affordable for our target audience, but requires some personal commitment. To be efficient in the long term, an endowment must be managed by people who have skin in the game.
It would also be irresponsible to have people who can't or don't want to personally donate $1,000 to our cause, or people outside of the tech industry, managing a multi-million-dollar community fund focused on solving a pretty niche industry problem. Otherwise, the endowment ends up being as efficient as a typical government!
Finally, I would not say that, let's say, founders of Nginx and curl are not interested in critical infra or don't understand it :)
> I would not say that, let's say, founders of Nginx and curl are not interested in critical infra or don't understand it
Congratulations, you managed to pick out the two projects in the set that makes it merely "mostly" (instead of "entirely") frivolous.
It requires choosing projects, and most people don't have time for this.
But the main problem is that such funding is simply not sustainable: corporate annual budgets for OSS are volatile, and individual donations are extremely volatile. It is not great for the critical infrastructure we all rely on.
The Open Source Endowment enables truly sustainable funding and also decreases the entry barrier for new OSS donors because it does not require choosing a specific project. A la buying the S&P 500 ETF instead of stock picking.
> Congratulations, you managed to pick out the two projects in the set that make it merely "mostly" (instead of "entirely") frivolous.
Out of curiosity, which founding donors specifically would qualify under your criteria for a "serious" project? If the founders of HashiCorp, Elastic, ClickHouse, Supabase, Nginx, and curl seem like a mostly frivolous band to you...
By the sound of it, we can probably expect most of the stakeholders to be less interested in critical infrastructure or anything that solves real problems for actual human beings and more interested in the kind of frivolous devops make-work that creates more problems than it solves.