Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pwdisswordfishy 112 days ago
> founders of HashiCorp, Elastic, ClickHouse, Supabase, Vue.js, Pydantic, Nginx, Gatsby, n8n, and curl

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.
2 comments
whit537 112 days ago
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...

link
psychoslave 112 days ago
$1000 to join the discussion table, wow, that's an extremely high bar. What is the motivation of such an excluding entry barrier?
link
kvinogradov 108 days ago
We don't require a membership to participate in GitHub discussions, but it is required to be invited to closed events and to be part of the OSE governance.

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!

link
kvinogradov 112 days ago
It is a community-driven initiative - we encourage developers to join as donors and help to shape it. Also, our model from the very start is about deep layers of infrastructure: https://endowment.dev/endowment/#model.

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 :)

link
pwdisswordfishy 111 days ago
If someone has money, why would they be better off joining this as a donor instead of just giving that money directly to someone who's actually doing good and necessary work? Everything about this seems like it will be a waste of whatever resources go into it. Like that one time Mozilla decided to help, through one of its grants, to secure $400,000 in funding for... the Webpack project.

> 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.

link
kvinogradov 108 days ago
The endowment model is complementary to direct donations, which many of OSE donors make. For example, I did this a lot: https://kvinogradov.com/algo-sponsors. Some people do this privately, and the largest public case among our donors seems to be https://ziglang.org/news/300k-from-mitchellh/

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...

link