The Open Source Endowment, a fund aimed at supporting sustainable OSS by spending only on investment profits, has been established.
The establishment of the Open Source Endowment (OSE), a fund to support open source projects, was announced on February 27, 2026. OSE was launched as 'the world's first endowment-based fund for open source projects,' and aims to achieve sustainable support by adopting a method of 'investing donated funds and allocating only the profits from the investment to support funds.'
Open Source Endowment — World's First Endowment Fund for OSS
The results of open source projects are used all over the world, and some studies have shown that 95% of software relies on some form of open source software. Therefore, if a serious vulnerability is discovered in open source software, it can have a major impact on a wide range of fields. For example, when the serious bug ' Heartbleed ' was discovered in OpenSSL in 2014, and when 'Log4Shell' was discovered in the Java Log4j library in 2021, many products were affected, and countermeasures took a long time and cost a lot of money.
Why does the vulnerability 'Log4Shell (CVE-2021-44228)' discovered in the Java Log4j library have such a big impact on the world? - GIGAZINE
Preventing serious vulnerabilities requires ample human resources and long-term maintenance. However, many open source projects suffer from a lack of funding, and even projects that receive sufficient donations face the problem of donation amounts fluctuating depending on the global economic and political situation. OSE is a foundation established to solve these problems, and aims to provide sustainable support.
OSE uses an 'endowment-type fund' system, which invests funds collected from investors and uses investment profits to provide sustainable support. This endowment-type fund is a proven system used by university endowments and other organizations. OSE aims to earn an annual interest rate of 7-8% and has already raised $716,000 (approximately 111.7 million yen) from 90 investors. The company plans to raise its first round of funding in the second quarter of 2026.
Projects are selected based on factors such as the risk of their disappearance and their current funding status. The selection criteria are published on GitHub , and comments about the fund are accepted in the following repository.
GitHub - osendowment/foundation: Key docs and discussions for donors
https://github.com/osendowment/foundation
Related Posts:
in Note, Posted by log1o_hf