title: A VC and some big-name programmers are trying to solve open source’s funding problem, permanently
author: u/Outrageous-Baker5834
contenttype: redditpost
publication: r/programming
published: 2026-02-26T16:11:04+00:00
sourceurl: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1rfeaei/avcandsomebignameprogrammersaretrying_to/
word_count: 613
Link: https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/26/a-vc-and-some-big-name-programmers-are-trying-to-solve-open-sources-funding-problem-permanently/
Score: 228 | Comments: 72 | Subreddit: r/programming
Top Comments
u/happyscrappy (102 pts):
They are venture capitalists, not venture socialists.
Expecting a VC to put the benefit of others over the benefit of himself is optimistic.
u/jhartikainen (62 pts):
It's a nice idea but wonder how it's going to pan out. As the article points out, this is not exactly a new concept.
Assuming the idea is that they have enough investments to not require additional funding while being able to take some of the returns to give to the community, they'll need hundreds of millions to truly say "funding problem is solved permanently". Compare to how the article points out Linux Foundation gave around 6 million in total in 2025 to 14 projects. That's not a lot of projects.
Anyway I hope they can get some money together. Any support is better than nothing, but the hype in the article title feels a bit overblown.
u/SaltMaker23 (205 pts):
Money flows create ownership lines.
Those ownership lines will make it impossible for opensource projects in that ecosystem to advance in a direction no endorsed by the parent company.
It's like opensource done by gigacorps like Google, it's opensource but it's not really open, it's just a public source project.
u/germanheller (39 pts):
as someone who builds on a bunch of open source libs (electron, xterm.js, node-pty), the funding problem is real and I feel the guilt of depending on stuff maintained by people doing it for free. but every attempt to fix this ends up creating weird incentive structures — either the VC expects a return which conflicts with the open source ethos, or the money only reaches the top 50 most visible projects while the critical-but-boring dependencies get nothing.
the maintainers who actually need funding are the ones nobody's ever heard of
u/theaiwizard (30 pts):
this is a trap.
u/mzalewski (31 pts):
Can anyone name a single thing that VC touched that turned out good in the long term?
So excuse my skepticism.
u/matthieum (14 pts):
Backers of the Open Source Endowment include [...] Mitchell Hashimoto (founder of HashiCorp, which sold to IBM for $6.4 billion last year) [...]
The nonprofit, which just achieved formal 501(c)(3) status, has currently raised more than $750,000 in commitments.
I do wonder how convinced our backer really is, since they at most committed 0.01% ($640,000) of their own money to the project.
u/BlueGoliath (8 pts):
While it is certainly possible for open-source developers to commercialize their free projects
The history on that isn't the greatest. Sometimes when a developer does that, people throw tantrums and call the developer(s) assholes. Only immediate user / developer facing projects seems to work out via support contracts. Anything low level is a no go.