[gtowey]

700k from 60+ "founding donors" = an average of 11k per person.

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.

[kvinogradov]

OSE has a diverse community of donors, and most of them are not even close to that net worth level. Around 75% of our donors contributed in $1-200k range. We think that every donation matters, and hugely respect everybody supporting open source.

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?

[gtowey]

So I know you're trying to shame my by pointing out my hypocrisy here, but I assure you that I wouldn't have made the original comment there if I didn't have a leg to stand on.

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.

[kvinogradov]

Thanks for sharing the context, it's really helpful. For full transparency, I am not a high-net-worth individual either, and I also grew up dirt-poor and now am a modestly successful 34-year-old tech dude.

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.

[psychoslave]

Not everyone operate on same consideration regarding money. The mere fact to be able to donate something that is a significant portion of a median income salary is already the privilege of the most wealthy, so more than that this is the very limited realms of the winner take it all game of the casino or the casino owner. For this class of people, money has nothing to do with what it represents to most people. So there is no way people from these distinct classes can understand each other in term "share of net worth", because they are the same words that refer to completely different realities.

[whattheheckheck]

They didn't get there by being nice so by definition they're cutthroat tight wads