I personally really like Niko's idea to strive for many kinds of sponsorships, and not having just the Rust Foundation being responsible for everything concerning the Rust project and its development.
I think we should aim for the Rust Foundation to be as lean as possible, just to solve the teams' issues that require a legal presence, such as:
- Holding the trademarks, which are now owned by Mozilla
- Registering the project's domains, which are now registered in the name of a core team member
- Obtaining code signing certificates
- Sign contracts on behalf of the project
- Having a bank account that can be used to temporarily store money, such as the funding for the All Hands, or other programs like Increasing Rust's Reach. Funding for all of that should not come from generic donations to the Rust Foundation, but instead it should be collected by the people responsible for the initiatives (i.e. by looking for sponsors for that single event).
If we explicitly remove from the goals of the foundation raising donations for the whole project or paying people to work on Rust, we could remove a lot of politics from the equation and eventually prevent big donors (such as companies) from wanting influence in the decision making, as we would not seek big donations anyway.