What are the incentives on the user side to pay the fees to Tidelift? How would Tidelift prevent free riding?
It’s an interesting idea but it sounds like it lacks anything that really binds the developer to a level of service. Plus the pay isn’t “quit your day job”-good so ya know, that day job is gonna take priority. My gut reaction is that it sounds like an easy way for companies to pay a sum that lets them feel less guilty about freeloading off someone else’s work, and if the developer is more responsive to their requests, hey, bonus.
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Even that "far from quitting your dayjob" amount of money could in theory impact a lot of "do I keep maintaining that lib a younger version of myself once built?" decisions. If that was the only thing tidelift promised paying companies, protects that get donations are less likely to get abandoned, it would kind of make sense. But in their sales copy, they are actually selling services (no: see correction above) provided by "lifted" maintainers, and that's where it stops being funny, for all sides involved (except tidelift). I wonder if the terminolocal proximity to "shoplift" ever occurred in their investor talks...
If they ever make it to the point of regular payouts, there will likely be some hidden scene of opportunists rushing to get recognised as the maintainer of as many abandoned - or just stabilized to the point of nondevelopment - packages as possible. Kind of like the alleged scooter-charging fights (no idea wether those are real or just news-fiction), perhaps something good could come out of that nonetheless? (maintainership-hoarders actually ending up doing some maintenance)
How is the payment distributed proportionally to each contributor?
Or is it the case that the lead maintainer can decide to receive funds from tide lift without paying the contributors.
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Tidelift is promising them the stars about services while not being involved at all in their fulfilment (no: see chevron above), except for maybe threatening to kick out their "lifted" projects if they don't deliver. (or maybe even sue whoever pressed "lift your package"?)
The more benign interpretation, as in a peer comment, is "allow me to donate without figuring out the distribution myself". That sounds perfectly reasonable, but it would be much more convincing if they had less promises in their pitch to subscribers and a "pay as you like" option (here's n $, please figure out the appropriate distribution for me while taking your cut").
Also, with the well established "failure or unbounded financial success" model of VC funding, how could one ever expect tidelift to not eventually abuse their position by taking seen ever higher cut? Maybe if it was a bootstrapped business, one could reasonably hope for a promise of only taking what is needed to be held up, but anything with actual investors needs a more formal arrangement. Maybe a charity/coop/nonprofit/foundation with clearly defined and enforceable bylaws that transparently buys implementation, operation and services from an associated for-profit might do, but "trust us, we have cute toddlers and pets" just isn't enough.
I can thus dispose some money each month and feel that I'm donating (even if it's just a few cent) to every project I use. If more people find this easy, a lot of small donations will make a big one.