Doesn’t happen very often, but I agree with AWS. Open source has very much become a vendor-sponsored affair and there are fewer and fewer actual community-driven projects.
I do see a scenario where the project becomes tainted because of it. Not really sure how to approach this as maintainers definitely need to get reimbursed in some way.
I wonder if some kind of not for profit organization could act as a benefactor to important open source projects. So people can just donate to this organization, maybe even give monthly or whatever, and the organization doles out the funds to open source projects based on the amount of maintainers and importance to the community at large.
Like a charity for open source. They’d have to operate with complete transparency and justify their actions to avoid accusations of corporate favoritism, but I think it would be doable.
Does something like this already exist?
The issue really depends more on the open source project. Some might have the organizational ability to receive money, direct it to worthy uses, and self govern. Others are just one person projects that will die and splinter off when the person working on it no longer does so.