I much rather get one or two corporations sponsoring my project than have each of my users pay $5, for the various reasons outlined in sibling threads. Or bette

I much rather get one or two corporations sponsoring my project than have each of my users pay $5, for the various reasons outlined in sibling threads. Or better yet, I wish there were government-level grants for this kind of work. I've been thinking of seeking out sponsors for urllib3 (Python http library, core of Python Requests which recently broke 2 million downloads). After maintaining and enhancing the library since 2009 (with on/off contributors of varying quality), keeping the code quality high while not using the library myself[0] has been hard. Motivation to work on it has been hard to come by, but at the same time it's not as easy to give away to another maintainer as some of my other projects (workerpool and s3funnel have had very smooth transitions). Getting some hours per month paid by a sponsor would definitely make some of these weekends easier to swallow, but I'm not sure which pricing model is best to pitch. Maybe offer to charge something like 1/2 of my normal hourly rate and let them dictate some feature/bug prioritization? Or maybe a tiered Kickstarter-like approach would be better? Does anyone have experience with this? -- [0] I love the library myself, but I haven't had any excuses to do http-related stuff lately.