[benjamuk]

Hey, Head of Product at Open Collective (and former Tidelift employee) here:

As far as I am aware Tidelift pays maintainers in exchange for a minimal set of commitments, which is used to sell the Tidelift subscription. They curate packages of ‘known good’ open source projects for enterprises and provide a set tools for users to better understand what software they depend upon.

Funds is a little more free-format, facilitating a relationship between maintainers and organisations on their own terms. No contracts, no promises, no agendas. We take on the work of administrating payments to projects and of ensuring companies have what they need in their procurement processes.

In doing so we hope to lower the barriers to the degree that we broaden access to funding for open source.

[genericone]

Doesn't this enable maintainers to look at someone's submitted code, deny its inclusion for any reason personal/financial, and include it at a later date and claim expense? Since the code submission is open-source, isn't a malicious maintainer able to basically copy the code in-spirit under a pseudo-account, and then claim the benefits from the fund for themself? I'm just saying that once monetary benefits are involved, incentives skew away from code quality and community, and towards number one.

Maintainers are above the other developers, is there going to be some community oversight?

Who decides how much expense can be claimed?

[Qwertious]

>we hope to lower the barriers to the degree that we broaden access to funding for open source.

Q: who is the primary demographic of funders this is aimed at? Am I correct in saying it's mostly aimed at getting more corporate funding for OSS? (Non-rhetorical question)