I think it's less to do with a small number of companies making big donations like this, it'd be much nicer to have many organizations making even small contrib

I think it's less to do with a small number of companies making big donations like this, it'd be much nicer to have many organizations making even small contributions based on usage/complexity of the project. This is what Tidelift is trying to do, the biggest barrier to more projects getting the amount of funding that we do from them is the number of businesses wanting that sort of relationship with their open source dependencies. The amount we receive from Tidelift is not typical for most projects since we're a medium complexity project that is a part of almost every Python project dependency list.