Hi. With respect, I'd like to challenge the idea that integrating more ways to get funded would undermine some core aspect of Debian.
I think there are two aspects that I consider when I think about the idea that Debian is not funded by a particular company: 1) Independence. Many people join Debian as a member of the community and their actions in the community are motivated by goals that last beyond a particular job and that we are able to act independently of large commercial interests. 2) On the other hand I'm concerned that Debian developers can be under funded. We want to get more people involved in free software and Debian. We want to encourage sources of funding that are independent, allowing people who want to be independent to actually be independent and to find ways to make that work for them successfully. The aspects of independence I care about are actually enhanced if it is easier to find funding for doing Debian work. In my mind, finding initiatives like this that allow our members to easily find funding for their work would significantly benefit the community. As an example, I think it would be great if people working on core tools like Apt, Dpkg, Debhelper, had the option of accepting funding for their work from diverse sources. I think that finding ways to foster that option for parts of our community who want it would be very good. The stuff we do actually does cost money. And running away from that rather than trying to hulp out community members who would like to be funded actually gives more power to members of our community who work for corporations or who are able to organize significant blocks of money for a particular purpose. I don't think that is a huge problem in our community; I value the contributions of corporations who allow their employees to spend significant tim on Debian. But I also value spending effort making other options possible. --Sam