whit537

Hey, everyone. Thanks so much for participating in this thread! I couldn't have asked for a better "retirement party" haha. I followed along all day yesterday while wrapping up the last few things at Sentry. Right as I posted my final goodbye on Slack, a friend showed up unannounced (my latest godson, in fact). We had a wonderful visit, drinking fresh iced tea on the front porch in the sunshine. What a contrast ... and a confirmation. The evening rolled on. By the time I returned to check the Slack replies, the company 'top was locked. C'est fini.

I'm now posting this from the family laptop. (If you want to see the hand-written original, you'll have to visit. ;) I'll be using it to fulfill my obligations as an Open Source Endowment board member through August. I've turned off chadwhitacre.com, and deleted (or kicked off deletions for) Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Twitter, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Discord, and Reddit. I've deleted one Amazon account and am working on the other (I'm pretty sure my dad's last book and author page are associated with it). I've transferred the openpath.quest domain and repos to Vlad-Stefan Harbuz, who asked if he could preserve it. I also gave him softwarecommons.com, the Czarin font, and MP4s of the five Open Path episodes to reupload so I can finish deleting my YouTube channel. (Maybe I'll burn DVDs to watch offline. Can I make VHS?) My Google account will be around as long as I need email; zetaweb.com is my last domain on auto-renew. If anyone wants to buy xmin.org or gospeldesk.{com,org}, ping me on chad@ before August. That'll subsidize 10-year renewals for my dad's memorials, whitacregreek.com and singinghome.com. Those are hosted on GitHub pages, so I won't be deleting that account. I've archived my other repos. I'll lose access if someday I'm able to delete email, which won't be until I don't need Carta anymore, at least. There's probably some other stuff that will make it hard to delete email. Wish me luck. Dang's even harder, so, here, I'm stuck. ;^)

My hope with the magazine is to recover a more humane information technology, so even though I'm leaving the Internet, I'm not leaving public life. After all, all the world's a stage, to quote a sage. Whether your own performance here has been friendly or cynical, thank you for it. This whole thread is beautiful to me, and all its little details. I love you, as much as this meatstick-manipulated textarea in the virtual realm will allow, which is not much, but not none. Hopefully some day one of you, friend or foe, finds me in the physical realm where we can vibrate air instead. I would love that! Until then, keep being HN.

"Someone looked straight at it in 2015 and wrote down, in plain English, exactly why xz was dangerous."

Yes, stars are a popularity contest. No open source project has ever become this popular this quickly.

Nice! Missing https://opensourcepledge.com/ tho :)

Some day. :)

You can follow along w/ model development in this repo:

https://github.com/osendowment/model

Thanks, captured here: https://github.com/osendowment/endowment.dev/issues/34#issue...

Germany is making it work† but seems quite far off to say the least in the US. "Voluntary tax" like this is provocative in its own right, will be interesting to see what gets unlocked more broadly if this succeeds.

† https://www.sovereign.tech/programs/fund

> I've been a part of the HN community longer than

Dang, got me beat, too. :) gg

Here are a couple salient portions of our IRS application to put your mind at ease. :^)

> In limited circumstances, the Foundation may make grants to organizations that are not described in IRC Section 501(c)(3), or to individual OSS developers, maintainers, researchers, and educators. These grants will support persons and organizations engaged in developing, maintaining, securing, documenting, or conducting research on free and open source software critical to public digital infrastructure.

> Any such grants will be made exclusively for charitable or educational purposes, with the Foundation retaining complete discretion and control over the use of funds consistent with Revenue Ruling 68-489.

[...]

> In addition to project-based grants, the Foundation will make recognition awards to individuals who have made extraordinary contributions to OSS serving as critical public digital infrastructure. These awards are analogous in structure and purpose to MacArthur Fellowships, the National Medal of Science, Pulitzer Prizes, and similar recognition programs administered by 501(c)(3) organizations.

Our bylaws are pretty standard:

https://endowment.dev/docs/bylaws/

What part of them is "undemocratic" in your view?

Noted in the abstract, thanks. Concrete examples more useful ofc.

> "pay operating costs" is one place non-profits often find fraud.

If you find it here please let us know.

Thanks, Alex. Ticketed here:

https://github.com/osendowment/foundation/issues/26

Will take some time ofc but good to plant the seed now. :)

Let's back up: The way an endowment works is that donors donate money, which goes into a more-or-less permanent investment fund. The interest from the investment fund is then used to a) fund mission-aligned programs (in our case, OSS), b) stay ahead of inflation, and c) pay operating costs.

Where are you seeing capitalists "extract a slice of the pie" here?

I love this. Reminds me of MacArthur Foundation's genius grants as well. Linux Foundation has fellows, but it's a small % of budget.

Thanks, noted at https://github.com/osendowment/endowment.dev/issues/34#issue...

Former VC!?

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.

The details of how we're thinking about this are in:

https://github.com/osendowment/model

Happy to have you join us there to iterate on the model. We do prioritize input from paid-up members ofc. ;^)

> flooded with requests to give money to vibe-coded crap

And our plan is to willy-nilly give money to everyone who asks for it with no oversight or attention to other factors or human involvement. Game over. You win.

I'll put a plug for the Open Source Pledge here:

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!

Thanks for the idea, tabbott. Made a ticket to track:

https://github.com/osendowment/foundation/issues/24

We discussed this prior to launch, and obviously decided to launch as you see it. :) Our reasoning was that a) standardizing on GitHub URLs makes it easier to do automated analysis as part of the funding model, and b) any project important enough to matter will have at least a GitHub mirror. If you have counter-examples to (b), please comment them on GitHub (see what I did there?) or here and I will copy/paste for you. :)

https://github.com/osendowment/endowment.dev/issues/34

Glad we found some common ground together. ;^)

Kinda up to you. Recruit your friends to join if you want a say. :^)

> 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...

Agreed. Tailwind shows that a class of business models that were traditionally used to subsidize Open Source are vulnerable now that AI intermediates between downstream and upstream devs. It was always a tenuous funding arrangement, though, because it goes against the true economic grain of OSS as a "gift community." OSE aligns much more closely with the nature of OSS. I doubt we'll be able to help Tailwind in the short run, but hopefully we can address the problem at a deep enough level in the long run to avoid future Tailwinds (as it were).

Open Collective (OC) is great! It's primarily a payments platform.

Open Source Collective (OSC, which is related to OC in convoluted ways I don't fully understand) is a fiscal sponsor of OSS projects, and is also great. :^)

Open Source Endowment (OSE), on the other hand, is a pile of money that earns interest that then gets distributed to OSS projects. So conceptually some projects either fiscally hosted by OSC or using OC as their payments platform could receive funds from OSE.

Does that help?

Edit to disclaim: I'm on the OSE board.

The openclaw/openclaw repo now has more stars than torvalds/linux, moving to #14 on EvanLi's Top 100 list with 219k:

https://github.com/EvanLi/Github-Ranking/blob/master/Top100/...

CodeCrafters is #1 with 468k.