It is a community-driven initiative - we encourage developers to join as donors and help to shape it. Also, our model from the very start is about deep layers of infrastructure: https://endowment.dev/endowment/#model.
Finally, I would not say that, let's say, founders of Nginx and curl are not interested in critical infra or don't understand it :)
If someone has money, why would they be better off joining this as a donor instead of just giving that money directly to someone who's actually doing good and necessary work? Everything about this seems like it will be a waste of whatever resources go into it. Like that one time Mozilla decided to help, through one of its grants, to secure $400,000 in funding for... the Webpack project.
> I would not say that, let's say, founders of Nginx and curl are not interested in critical infra or don't understand it
Congratulations, you managed to pick out the two projects in the set that makes it merely "mostly" (instead of "entirely") frivolous.
It requires choosing projects, and most people don't have time for this.
But the main problem is that such funding is simply not sustainable: corporate annual budgets for OSS are volatile, and individual donations are extremely volatile. It is not great for the critical infrastructure we all rely on.
The Open Source Endowment enables truly sustainable funding and also decreases the entry barrier for new OSS donors because it does not require choosing a specific project. A la buying the S&P 500 ETF instead of stock picking.
> Congratulations, you managed to pick out the two projects in the set that make it merely "mostly" (instead of "entirely") frivolous.
Out of curiosity, which founding donors specifically would qualify under your criteria for a "serious" project? If the founders of HashiCorp, Elastic, ClickHouse, Supabase, Nginx, and curl seem like a mostly frivolous band to you...
Finally, I would not say that, let's say, founders of Nginx and curl are not interested in critical infra or don't understand it :)