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Funding: Open Source Endowment and "How Does Open Source Software Get Funded?"
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Unicorn Media ☛ Can the Open Source Endowment Fix What Years of Neglect Broke?
The Open Source Endowment promises a permanent funding fix for vital open source infrastructure, yet its slow‑drip investment approach raises questions about how much help will reach projects that need cash now.
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How Does Open Source Software Get Funded?
None of this would exist without Richard Stallman. In 1983, Stallman—then a programmer at MIT’s AI Lab—announced the GNU project, an ambitious attempt to create a completely free operating system. In 1985, he founded the Free Software Foundation to support it.
Stallman’s philosophy was radical: software should be free—not as in price, but as in freedom. Users should have the right to run software for any purpose, study how it works, modify it, and share it with others. He called these the “four freedoms” and argued that restricting them was morally wrong.
To protect this vision, Stallman created the GNU General Public License (GPL). The GPL is clever: it allows anyone to use, modify, and distribute the software, but requires that any derivative works must also be released under the same terms. This “copyleft” mechanism prevents companies from taking free software, making improvements, and locking those improvements away as proprietary code. It’s the reason Linux remains open today.