Would be cooler to have an open source/license framework for handling payment processing, easy industry wide contract templates: why not make a X,Y,Z (like MIT, BSD for licenses) thing for contracts with open source vendors AND then if the open source developer does not want to handle all this stuff himself give him the opportunity to choose a service like tidelift with a certain percentage cut.
For large companies to buy something, there's considerable overhead: legal review, finance review, management, budget, etc.
That's _after_ someone at the company has figured out what the product is and that it makes sense to buy.
We wouldn't want all of this overhead involved every time a developer adds a new package to an app. And if it were involved for all the thousands of deps most teams have these days, there would be a whole second team just managing the purchases.
As a practical matter, software teams need to buy dozens rather than thousands of products.
By grouping a lot of packages together, Tidelift lets those thousand transitive dependencies benefit, while previously only the largest high-profile projects had a chance.
This reality (that buying stuff has a lot of friction) also explains why Tidelift builds "fund a sales team" into the model.
