Comment by leoc

I think that might be the best strategy: a charity playing Google and being transparent about what money it distributes to whom, but being less transparent about the exact mechanism it uses to calculate the disbursement, or at least being ready to make arbitrary future changes at its discretion to the mechanism to counter gaming (as well as outright zapping clear offenders ad hoc). One nice thing about this strategy is that it could generate a virtuous circle: consolidate together a big enough pot of money from early adopters and you could start getting some good media coverage, which in turn might generate interest and donations from "normie" sources which would never have wanted to be in before then. Similarly and relatedly, IME one of the excuses for low Open Source donations from big US companies is "we have to monitor and audit where all donated money goes, and that's too much overhead". Centralise that work in a big, fairly well-trusted charity to which multiple other organisations can donate and that excuse is hopefully removed or partly removed. It has long annoyed me that the Open Source Initiative never (AFAIK) tried to take on this role, despite having been (at one time, at least) the most obvious candidate for the role.

Of course, the big hazard here is "who watches the watchmen?" But public scrutiny plus the fact that others can jump in and try to take some of the same middleman role might help to keep that risk partly under control.