this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
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Question - What is the benefit of becoming a part of such organisation over just donating to the developers/maintainers directly?
The project itself always decides, unless you fork the project and do your own thing. You can wave a carrot in front of them (if you do X then you get $Y), but the relevant factor is going to be the size of the carrot $Y, not directly the "collective bargaining" via that platform. How would your platform facilitate finding a stronger negotiation position?
It sounds like you may have discovered the "fiscal sponsor" concept. There are a couple of nonprofits already offering such services, such as the Software Freedom Conservancy or OpenCollective. The foundations like Linux Foundation, Apache Foundation, or Eclipse Foundation also come to mind.
However, for all of these the project decides to join a host. Foundations can't just annex projects.
Sure. It's less in our case about motivating developers and more about attracting outside development talent (via $$$) to fix bugs and add new features. And also being able to fund things like promotion, documentation, etc. The devs are friendly but just generally at capacity with current maintenance tasks. They accept reasonable PRs but don't accept donations.
Yes I've been looking into OpenCollective, it doesn't do all the things we need, but it does many of them and very well may find a place in this stack of tools we'll be relying on. We already have the 501c3 though so we don't need a fiscal sponsor.