Hello,
I would like to raise awareness about a former proposal I made which was rejected by EF back then, while the IDE WG was being constructed IIRC, but which I believe still makes sense for the best interest of Eclipse projects, and thus for the IDE WG stakeholders.
The proposal was to allow projects that use GitHub to promote sponsors using GitHub sponsors. The promoted sponsors could be "institution", such as EF or the WG, to gather generic donations and route them where is makes most sense to them; but also -and IMO more improtantly- to allow some peer-to-peer sponsoring: individual committers who want it could be promoted directly to receive sponsoring from individual users via the GitHub sponsors program.
I believe that a way to do direct sponsoring can fill a gap in the current business ecosystem: some people may have a strong interest in 1 particular project, but no resource/need to hire 1 freelancer with a contract, but still would like to encourage some people to keep active on this project with a fine control of their money assignment. This is what GitHub sponsors can enable better than anything else I'm aware of. Given that there some very efficient individual developers in our community. it would IMO make sense to allow more money to flow to them in a more distributed and agile way.
Cheers,
