Let financial contributors choose to fund the Nix team specifically

[roberth]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

On OpenCollective you can create projects so that financial contributors can direct their money towards the goals they care about.
I would think that a lot of people would care about the nix tool, but we don't have a way to know that.
It's great that companies like Determinate Systems, Tweag, Flox, Obsidian Systems and Hercules CI donate time to the Nix team, but it seems there may be some untapped potential here. Accepting resources from diverse sources makes the Nix team more independent.

Describe the solution you'd like

The page already has an opencollective link, which is great, but it does not let contributors "vote with their money". Instead of pointing to the general project ("Supporting the Nix ecosystem's infrastructure, and projects implementing the purely functional deployment model."), create a project, a sibling of "Documentation Project", which is all about enabling contributors.
Acknowledge the in-kind sponsors on the page.
Publish @fricklerhandwerk's biyearly report on the opencollective.

Describe alternatives you've considered

a. Allocate some fraction of the general budget.

b. Keep limiting to in-kind time sponsoring. Keeps things simpler perhaps, but seems inefficient. This reminds me that we should manage expectations. Donations are not purchases, etc. I think contributors already understand that, but doesn't hurt to make that explicit.

Additional context

Priorities

Add 👍 to issues you find important.

[fricklerhandwerk]

I suggest we try funding a fairly narrowly scoped project first to demonstrate cause and effect.

[fricklerhandwerk]

Discussed in the Nix team meeting 2023-06-05:

• @edolstra: sounds reasonable
• @fricklerhandwerk: should find a topic to focus on
  • @roberth: could propose multiple
    • @fricklerhandwerk: disagree, will dilute attention. should present a clear goal to subscribe to
  • @roberth: worry most sponsors will not care about long-term things such as testing
    • @fricklerhandwerk: will try to come up with a convincing narrative
• possible projects:
  • testing
  • RFC 92
  • CA derivations
  • Hydra maintenance
    • probably out of scope

[nixos-discourse]

This issue has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/2023-06-05-nix-team-meeting-minutes-60/28933/1

[nixos-discourse]

This issue has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/german-federal-funding-for-foss-development/29036/4

[nixos-discourse]

This issue has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/2023-10-23-nix-team-meeting-minutes-97/34561/1

[fricklerhandwerk]

Related: NixOS/foundation#107