Carnegie Mellon University Libraries Associate Dean for Digital Infrastructure G. Sayeed Choudhury has received a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to launch the Ecosystem for Next Generation Infrastructure (ENGIN) Software Foundation. This two-year initiative represents the next strategic phase of the Carnegie Mellon University Open Source Programs Office (OSPO), housed within the University Libraries. The ENGIN Software Foundation (ESF) aims to fill a critical and widely recognized gap in the academic open source ecosystem.
Open source software is now essential to many academic fields, but research teams often lack the support structures and funding models needed to maintain their projects after grants end. While foundations such as the Linux Foundation and Eclipse Foundation provide significant support for open-source communities, they are often oriented toward corporate and commercial needs. ESF will offer services tailored specifically to academic research teams to help university-born software projects transition from research projects into community-supported markets.
“Through our engagement with faculty and students, we’ve identified a clear need for pathways that help academic open source projects achieve broader impact and sustainability,” said Choudhury, who also directs the CMU OSPO. “The ENGIN Software Foundation will provide the analysis, training, consulting, and support needed to help these projects build sustainable communities beyond their original research teams.”
The project will begin by partnering with three CMU open-source initiatives that have already collaborated with the OSPO: Temoa from the Open Energy Outlook, an optimization model used to evaluate energy policies and examine future energy scenarios; SPIRAL, a system for automatically generating high-performance software and hardware implementations of signal-processing algorithms; and Penrose, a platform that enables users to create high-quality mathematical and scientific diagrams through plain-text notation. Together, these projects show how research software can grow from small lab tools into widely used resources if they have the right support and guidance.
Carnegie Mellon University Provost Jim Garrett has committed institutional funding to support the foundation’s development, underscoring the university’s leadership in advancing open-source scholarship. Together, the Sloan grant and university support will fund the creation of comprehensive project profiles, sustainability analyses using tools such as Bitergia and Scarf, and the development of reusable patterns that will be shared with other universities through the Community of University and Research Institution OSPOs (CURIOSS) network.
“The ESF addresses a well-known issue in the private sector that has yet to be fully addressed in the university sector,” said Stephen Walli, who will serve as Interim Director of the ESF and is adjunct faculty at Carnegie Mellon. “For research open source projects to achieve their full impact, there must be a pathway to wider adoption, engagement, and contribution. The ESF will provide the framework to support this transition within an academic context.”
Running from January 2026 through December 2027, the initiative will produce project profiles, technical reports, and a set of patterns that could be adopted by university OSPOs nationwide. While the first phase focuses on CMU projects, the ESF framework is designed to scale to institutions across the research ecosystem.
“Universities have tremendous open source potential that often remains untapped because projects lack the organizational framework to scale beyond their initial research teams,” said Joshua M. Greenberg, director of the Sloan Foundation’s Technology program. “The ENGIN Software Foundation offers a new way to help these projects reach their full potential and create broader social impact."
Building on the strong foundation created by the CMU OSPO, the ENGIN Software Foundation strengthens Carnegie Mellon's role as a national leader in supporting open source software development in universities.