Open Source Endowment – new funding source for open source maintainers
endowment.dev
endowment.dev
I have personal experience with university endowments, and at some point noticed that the open source world is remarkably similar to a top research university. They share the same reputation-based culture and functions — collaborative creation of IP as a public good, educating each other within thematic clusters, and commercializing only a small fraction of what they produce.
For universities, humanity has just two sustainable funding models: public spending or private endowments. Government support won't work for OSS at scale — it's too globally decentralized. And yet nobody had built an OSS-focused endowment before. After understanding why, I started building one together with other OSS folks.
Today we're publicly launching the Open Source Endowment — a community-driven endowment fund dedicated to sustainably funding maintainers of the most critical open source projects. All donations are invested in a low-risk portfolio, and only the investment income (~5%/year) is used for grants, making it independent of annual budgets and tech market volatility.
We recently received US 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charity status. The fund is at ~$700K, formed by 60+ founding donors — including founders of HashiCorp, Elastic, ClickHouse, Supabase, Vue.js, Pydantic, Nginx, Gatsby, n8n, and curl. Everyone is welcome to join them and participate in governance.
There's no perfect model for distributing OSS grants. Our approach: make it open, data-driven, measurable, and developed by people with skin in the game — donors. I tested this by personally donating $5K to 800+ Python projects in Dec 2024 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42312469). We're now looking to grow our donor community and together finalize the first model for grants in Q2 2026.
This is a pure community charity, and there are two things I'd love from HN:
1) Join as a donor — any amount — and help make OSE the most efficient long-term funding solution for OSS maintainers
2) Nominate OSS projects you think are critically underfunded on the Funding page at endowment.dev
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.
I work on a nonprofit platform that isn't "critical infrastructure," compared to a lot of stuff, so I'd likely not seek funding, in order to avoid stealing oxygen from the lone maintainer in Nebraska.
Open Source Collective is a separate 501(c)(6) organization that actively supports funders wanting to support FOSS projects or communities specifically. They share some board members, and they simply use Open Collective to do all the finance work, while also offering some level of advice and other IP holding services: https://docs.oscollective.org/welcome-and-introduction-to-os...
Open Source Endowment is different, in that it's soliciting 501(c)(3) donations, which the OSE board and membership will use for the endowment to choose FOSS projects/communities to provide grants for.
This topic should be a FAQ page on the OSE site, especially for funders who just want to donate "to some good FOSS" without knowing where to find it. When you donate to OSC, you pick specific collectives to give to (and it's not tax deductible). When you donate to OSE, you're giving to the endowment, that the OSE Members setup policies for how/where/when to provide grants to projects/communities (and it could be tax deductible).
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.
> 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...
I think this is hopelessly naive. The LLMs crapping out code are shamelessly ripping off open source code, sans copyright notice. It makes no sense for a foundation supporting open source to also support this massive copyright massacre.
Also, I think you're going to get flooded with requests to give money to vibe-coded crap, because if you have no skills or shame but want to make a little money off your AI-generated crap, why not try and extract money from this initiative? The curl guy showed this is very real.
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.
Now, setting aside ethical issues for a moment, open-sourced knowledge, writing, history, data, Q&A, and tech is essentially a prerequisite for a data-driven technology like LLMs, and if those turn out to be a net win for humanity, then we can directly trace the routes to initiatives like this one that can curate humanity's best contributions.
I think that AI eventually will solve technical maintenance problems, but not human-related ones: limited attention, trust, motivation issues. And we are going to support mostly "old" projects everybody relies on, not some new AI-gen stuff.
LLMs represent a very important opportunity to force-multiply limited resources.
Copyright is a fundamentally unethical concept and must die. Open source foundations should rightfully support the death of copyright, whether by LLMs or by other means.
Where are you seeing capitalists "extract a slice of the pie" here?
"pay operating costs" is one place non-profits often find fraud. Getting the money into the market between donors and builders, now you have to pay professional investors. You don't get to 7-8% returns without equities, what happens if the market tanks?
Why not build something super minimal that requires less management and operating costs? That doesn't have the market risk at the center of it all? That doesn't have more points for fraud and abuse?
If you find it here please let us know.
> Why not build something super minimal that requires less management and operating costs? That doesn't have the market risk at the center of it all? That doesn't have more points for fraud and abuse?
could still be usefully addressed.
Now OSE has no paid employees - the team is 100% volunteers. Its Board Directors and the Executive Director are required to personally donate $1000+/year. Operating costs are close to zero.
As organization evolves there might be higher operating costs, but our commitment to keep them as low as possible.
But all other areas should be as low-risk as possible — like accounting, legal, and investment management of a community endowment fund. We are exploring a few ideas on how to grow the fund faster than the market without increasing its risk profile, but they are complementary to a very conservative core strategy.
Besides OSE, I am a full-time VC — that's the area where investors are bold and invest in off-norm opportunities, but it lies on the totally opposite side of the investment risk spectrum. And directly mixing them does not seem like a good idea.
If this is successful in the first iteration, I'd love to see a UK and EU based charities too. That would allow european donors to support on a gross pay basis, and may simplify grants to european nationals too. (I'm sure similar things apply in other jurisdictions too.)
https://github.com/osendowment/foundation/issues/26
Will take some time ofc but good to plant the seed now. :)
Most likely we won't create our own subsidiaries, but will partner with local nonprofits (suggestions are welcome), which could make donations tax-deductible for UK/EU residents.
As for grants, we are totally fine with supporting European open source maintainers now. OSE has a global scope, limited only by the available payment infra and US regulations.
mmh. be very careful when choosing those. Esp. in former socialistic countries, and esp. in some of them (hint), where $$$ scheming has become bread-and-butter of the.. kind-of-former-but-new aparatchiks.. it's like an official mafia. Electrically speaking, they manage to find ways to ground and leech on any potential.. $100 or $100M alike.
otherwise - great initiative. The Commons (as of ivan ilich) need support and care in order to be .. there when needed.
Yeah, this will end well.
> 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.
To keep a nonprofit efficient and impactful, it is crucial for its governance to have skin in the game; otherwise, there will be no long-term alignment of interests. More details on why and how we implement this at the Open Source Endowment: https://kvinogradov.com/osendowment
I have my opinion on why this is happening and my explanation is that in Mozilla they lost their memory because they act as a company and not as a foundation (they have both the identities). With the layoffs they removed a lot of people working there for years that knows a lot, they lost the historic memory and I remember a lot of discussion with employees that had no idea that there was a community or that they have no idea what is a GPL license. I mean in 2018 I remember reviewing this as part of the Mozilla Reps council, https://github.com/OpenTechStrategies/open-source-archetypes that was created to help the employee to understand OSS but I think that after the managers that created moved away it was just left as it is.
Sorry for the flame but I think that when a foundation act like a corporation there are issues.
These are people who have net worth values in the 10's to 100's of millions of dollars and they could only give ~10k to open source software?
My goodness we're cooked. The oligarchs are so unbelievably cheap.
May I ask what it’s the right share of net worth one should donate to OSS? And what’s this share in your personal case?
I am not a high net worth individual. With a 20 year career as an IC in the tech industry though, I'm quite comfortably middle class. But even I have donated $10k to charity in a single year many times. Many tech companies offer charity gift-matching programs. I take full advantage of those by having a donor advised fund so I can capture the full gift match amount every year and then disburse those funds as desired. When I was briefly at Microsoft, they had an oddly generous gift match of up to $15k per year. I literally put up $15k of my own money each year to capture that $30k/year into a charity account for several years.
That's why I feel like I can comment critically on this. I'm a regular dude who grew up dirt-poor and ended up modestly successful in life and even I can manage to donate amounts of 10's of thousands annually.
Compared to the much more successful executive, CEO, founder class who you mentioned were among your donors. To the kind who own houses in the Los Altos hills worth 10 million plus, those numbers seem kind of paltry.
I'm not trying to take away from the success of your organization and its mission. I congratulate you on your fundraising efforts and I know you can't afford to be critical of your donors lest those donors sour on you. But truly, it does strike me how some of the wealthiest among us, who have benefited the most from these common goods, can give so little.
We are not building yet another HNWI-focused nonprofit, but a grassroots community endowment. It targets a donor like you – a regular tech industry worker who can support things they truly care about with a $1-100k donation. I think many developers love open source, don't they?
We intentionally targeted launching the endowment with a $0.5-1m initial size and many donors because:
1) It is not attractive for regular donors to support a project that is heavily funded by HNWIs. Let's say if I were able to donate to the Gates Foundation, it would be like peeing in the ocean and wouldn't matter. However, I am eager to support projects with peers among donors because it makes a difference. And that's the way to make OSE scalable and outlive all its founders.
2) It is important to maintain high decentralization of funding, which enables good community governance and accountability. Having a few outsized donors at the start kills it. Our donor Herfindahl–Hirschman index is ~1800 now.
3) As a VC (maybe a bit old school), I think that it is responsible to limit funding size at very early stages and grow it later together with achieved milestones and decreasing risks. It helps to build more efficient organizations.
Just take a look at https://endowment.dev/community - we obviously targeted notable founders at the start, but now it is a healthy mix with many everyday developers. You're welcome to join them.
Of course, OSE will look for large donations. But the goal is to raise them in balance with growing a community of smaller donors, maintaining decentralization and scalability.
The biggest issue that I see is that even for things that are in some respects "finished", grants on the order of $5k do not change the maintainance picture very much at all. If there's a sudden crisis with critical infrastructure, people will step. But that's precisely what we want to move away from, and to do that the funding needs to be living-wage level, not single-issue grants.
It is awesome when those grants happen, and specific new features or compatibility are worked on. But the sustainability question is really not about that kind of work, for the most part. Somebody needs to actually be the guy in Nebraska and they need to consider that their role. Possibly it is just one role among a few, but it needs to be bigger than a one-and-done $5k-sized role.
The question is really how to redirect the streams of revenue that currently flow toward capital so that the people who work on OSS can do this as a living, not a part time calling. I don't see grants as a significant part of that.
As it grows bigger, the grant size will also grow. One can help with this by donating and bringing in new donors!
On a global scale, likely less than 10% of the world's population has ever been able to save $5,000 at any point in their life, with the vast majority concentrated in high-income countries. In low- and middle-income countries, this is a rare achievement limited to a small, affluent minority.
I’m curious… would you consider having a “faculty” of “tenured” maintainers who receive livable funding and support based on a history of significant contribution? I could imagine something like “named chairs” and professorships you see for some tenured folks in academia. This could be useful for key project leaders, and contributors. In addition, any kind of function to train and develop the next generation of maintainers?
https://www.wired.com/story/top-ai-researchers-financial-bac...
I live in Cambridge, MA there are dozens of these relationships going on; big tech offers lucrative access to cutting edge hardware in return for closed research.
Just more insidious ways on how big tech requires massive amounts of welfare to exist and persist.
Good lord. Why do you think these greedy entities that have devoted their entire lifespans fucking over consumers, competitors, nations, and children are suddenly having a change of heart and aren't enforcing their will upon researchers?
Your comment I was replying to, as an aide-mémoire:
> I live in Cambridge, MA there are dozens of these relationships going on; big tech offers lucrative access to cutting edge hardware in return for closed research.
> Just more insidious ways on how big tech requires massive amounts of welfare to exist and persist.
So, yeah, there's plenty of reasons why they don't do that.
Open source wouldn't have a funding problem if people would stop being so averse to just paying for what they use. Maybe... the world should stop expecting something for nothing.
Doesn't this apply only to for-profit products? There's plenty of 501c3's with free "products".
For reference: This is exactly what happened to the Yorba Foundation, and numerous others since then.[1]
[1] https://www.stradley.com/business-vantage-point-blog/irs-con...
At the end of the day though, 501(c)(3) status is a purely US concept, doesn't apply to international organizations internationally, and doesn't necessarily mean that you "can't" do what anyone is discussing here. It just means that folks gonna have to pay taxes and "donations" can't be written off on the taxes of donors.
Perhaps, at the end of the day, not pursuing tax-exemption/charity status is a more honest approach. It certainly doesn't precluding doing any of what has been discussed, it just changes the financial efficiency.
I see this more as a way to answer the question of things like the maintainers of OpenSSL or sudo. One approach is to fund the "project" and let it deal with all of these questions. Another approach would be to fund the people themselves. So, have a faculty of expert software maintainers, vetted by the governance structure of the OSE. Within that faculty, you could have "adjuncts" and "residents" who have a time-bound grant and set of obligations. If they are successful and their work continues to be relevant, they could eventually apply for one of a defined set of "tenured" positions. Those positions would guarantee them independence and a stable source of income in order to continue their role as a maintainer.
The goal of this "faculty" would be sustainable OSS maintenance (which involves both leadership and contribution), rather than publishing research and teaching classes. So, similar overall structure and approach, but differing goals.
Tenured professors are not engaged in commercial product development.
OSS isn't commercial, per se.
Universities "ship" plenty of "products":
A way something like this could be interesting is if founders started donating 5% of equity when they started a company to an open source foundation like this one.
It doesn't impact the founder much financially: Success is very binary for founders. But in aggregate, if thousands of startup founders do this, there would be some hits and some of those hits could generate a significant endowment.
(You can also try to get people to donate who feel their success was built on top of open source, but I feel that after 10 years building a company to IPO, one's attention as a founder has likely been on business metrics and spending time with business people, not on technology and spending time with technologists, and that shift in attention can reduce people's feeling of gratitude for the amazing inheritance that is open-source software).
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!
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
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.
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
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.
Maybe giving money to the endowment gives you a vote? (Kills two birds with one stone.)
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. ;^)
Pay-to-play, this reinforces the SV mindset underpinning all of this.
Strongly recommend you revise this if you are trying to present yourself as egalitarian. Feedback and suggestions for improvement ought to be considered on the merits, not who it came from, especially if money is the differentiator. (setting aside the natural reputation based weighting)
I guess this is core of plan and will not change?
Because I was thinking about projects like OpenStreetMap which are generating very useful data used by various open source projects, but are not by itself gathering very big pile of dependencies.
I guess that those would be out of scope.
(note: for OpenStreetMap itself I have gigantic conflict of interest, I received some OSM-related grants for software development)
(or at least Codeberg, SourceHut, etc.)
That might be true, but many of the mirrors are unofficial.
If you're trying to come up with something like the "criticality score" based on repo metadata like the OpenSSF, you're likely to fail just like they did. Starting with Debian's popcon data makes a lot more sense, in my opinion.
Out of ethical disagreement they switched completely to codeberg. And they are certainly not the only ones, given signaling on the fediverse by other EU citizens.
Plus, OS maintainers now have to deal with agents and vibe coders who can commit plausibly-looking code that doesn't actually do what it's supposed to, so the volume of work for them is only growing.
Maybe a US VAT tax on the way there
1) In every country, most politicians and citizens have no clue about the problem we are discussing here. Thus OSS won't have a meaningful share in the gov budget.
2) If an OSS-advanced country funds open source now (like Germany - kudos to them!), it might easily change later with a new administration (like the support of nuclear plants in Germany).
3) If a very stable OSS-advanced country perpetually support open source, that creates a freerider problem - nowadays it seems that German taxpayers are supporting OSS, but others do not and unlikely will.
Meanwhile, private funding is sustainable (endowment model) and scalable because of aligned incentives — people voluntarily join, not taxed.
In a different world we would incentivize tech giants to sponsor critical open source projects by turning their donations into more serious tax write offs, up to a certain amount, and reviewed by experts within the industry, affiliated and unaffiliated with the companies doing the funding.
insert Electron joke
edit:formatting
The organization needs a way to make something valuable it can charge a (membership) fee for, not just collect donations. Then it can share some of those fees with its developer-contributors, byt distributing a dividend that goes on to prepetuity instead of individual one-time grants.
So, two types of members, contributor-developers, and code-using organizations which get a less restrictive license.
This seems like a chicken-and-egg problem, but once it starts going it could be sustainable.
You can follow along w/ model development in this repo:
Just another Silicon Valley bro that wants to be in-charge of something with zero democratic control. Very typical in the current environment, which is why it should be soundly rejected.
https://endowment.dev/docs/bylaws/
What part of them is "undemocratic" in your view?
Are you getting your ethics cues from SCOTUS?
Are you aware the kinds of language that are in the legal docs on GH, and what that enables?
As long as it is not something outright evil like theoretical Gazprom Open Source Fund or something similar.
I remember being so frustrated with why people aren't using Open source that I created a Ask HN about it [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45558430] (Ask HN: Why are most people not interested in FOSS/OSS and can we change that)
The answer was a bit of chicken and egg problem. For end users, Open source feels second to good UI/UX but for developers who are severely underfunded, UI/UX isn't that much of a concern.
It was also a chicken and egg problem of funding itself, the above problem could've been solved if people could fund developers for better UI/UX or QOL features and then these services can be made better and people could use them de-facto and donate them further.
The issue at the time to me felt like as such, the biggest problem holding Open Source back was its lack of funding. This idea captured my mind so much so that I may or may not have a FOSS manifesto in one of my files after thinking about it for many many days ;)
This seems to be doing something new for Open source. I always preferred Nlnet in such situations but Nlnet is a single donation model whereas this is an endowment model.
I really appreciate the author for creating it as its truly something new for Open source and something which I do feel like is a worthy experiment and I wish this project success to have meaningful impact on the massive funding problem of Open source itself hopefully.
I actually thought of something here but for countries who have sovereign wealth funds, perhaps one can argue that a tiny backdrop of that amount driven into some project like this could do wonders for data sovereignity itself and prevent lock-ins of PSU's if say especially more funding could be given to all Microsoft alternatives as I see online that Microsoft is one of the worst offenders of lock-in for govt.s where If I remember correctly, there were definitely billions of dollars involved (iirc, I could be wrong tho)
I genuinely wish this project massive success for its future. I do think that there are some gotchas within this though (like how are you gonna give the money to contributors and get the money to the contributor who lives in nevada from the infamous xkcd) but I can only hope that given they have built this, they are passionate about the problems with open source and would figure out gotchas (I hope sooner than later)
Also if I may ask if you ever might need any volunteer for the project itself [I would prefer some minimal payment (just enough to pay rent haha) in the spirit of the project itself] then please reach out to me from mail when there might be such need.
Side note but I also believe that one of the ideas I wish to suggest if possible is a side-branch of the endowment which can help non-profits to move from their locked-in solutions to open source solution / self-hosted and have them donate some money instead of paying to the locked-in solutions, but rather paying to the endowment fund itself.
I think you can also combine this with some providers who might wish to donate their hardware resources as well for free (Hetzner/OVH and many other Lowendtalk providers) for perhaps some good-will/some more attention to their company in the cutthroat competition.
So this can help save real money from already non-profits who have important missions and save them money for their real causes rather than hardware costs/licenses/lock-ins and they could instead spend a tiny fraction of that money to fund the project itself which could fund Open source itself as well.
This can end up being a win-win situation in my opinion.
I may be a little too excited but I do see lots of potential.
If possible, I'd love to reach out to you regarding this to have hopefully a meaningful discussion about it.
TLDR: I have also created a excalidraw diagram to better explain what I mean by the last paragraphs.
Here's the link to it: https://gist.github.com/SerJaimeLannister/aad16377a48fe023ac...