[EarlKing]

Boldly asserting that all grants will be made exclusively for charitable or educational purposes does nothing to change the character of the grant. If you're giving money to someone for commercial product development then you're giving money to someone for commercial product development ... and if that constitutes the majority of what you do then you've got a major problem.

[kvinogradov]

OSE won't give money for commercial product development - it is dedicated to supporting existing highly-used _nonprofit_ and independent OSS. Some specific examples are at https://endowment.dev/faq/#grants

[nwellnhof]

As soon as you start paying individual maintainers, it stops being nonprofit OSS they work on. If you direct your funds to other charities, you're only shifting the tax issue to them. If you want to give money to maintainers with no strings attached, it's basically impossible to avoid double taxation.

[kvinogradov]

We explicitly explained to the IRS that our endowment plans to make awards and grants to individual OSS developers and maintainers in the US and other eligible countries. Given our limited target scope — not just any software, but critical nonprofit independent OSS — it was acceptable, and the IRS approved our 501(c)(3) status. And we plan to operate within what is described in our application.