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Comment by mewsen | Hacker News Reader

"I have yet to come across a single popular Open Source project that thrives while being funded by private individuals, small and medium size companies."

The only oss project that is funded by private individuals that comes up in my head is GrapheneOS, it has over 500 sponsors on Github.

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Tor Project is over 50% funded by individual contributors and relatively smaller private foundations [1]. Their expenses are roughly 50% of the revenue, so they could actually survive without their biggest funder - the US government.

[1] https://www.torproject.org/static/findoc/2020-2021-TorProjec...

GoDot currently receives €50,521 per month

https://fund.godotengine.org/

Also Blender. Best user-facing example out there IMO.

I think GIMP, Inkscape, Audacity, ffmpeg all fall into this category too.

Quite possibly a majority of GPL does.

Wasnt blender funded by government grants (although very small IIRC) and Epic ?

According to the annual report[1],

                           2021             2022
   Epic Mega Grant       € 334,609 16%     € 87,540  4%
   Dev. Fund patron      € 687,896 32%  € 1,073,684 49%
   Dev. Fund corporate   € 314,546 15%    € 218,000 10%
   Dev. Fund individual  € 364,032 17%    € 423,837 20%
   Blender Market        € 126,502  6%    € 155,673  7%
   Google Summer of Code   € 2,649  0%      € 2,003  0%
   Other large donations € 148,486  7%    € 160,819  7%

[1] https://download.blender.org/foundation/Blender-Foundation-A...

Asahi Linux is another good example

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