Can't help but notice a link between Graeber:

the creation of meaningless administrative jobs and the concomitant bullshitization of real work — forcing nurses, doctors, teachers, professors to fill out endless forms all day — [ . . . ] has the effect of massively lowering productivity

and Ibryam (/via @renatocan):

Creating marketing campaigns, brand designs, distributing stickers, etc. takes money, and some foundations can assist with that as well. At its core, foundations implement the right processes to interact with users, developers, and control mechanisms and ensure distribution of available financial resources to open source projects for the common good.

Some of this is unavoidable and necessary work. We need people to inform each other of what's out there, and we need people to translate between people and make decisions if we want problems to be solved productively. But a lot of the brand designs, stickers, t-shirts and whatnot are workarounds due to the fact that we don't know better ways to fund free software. The foundations and fiscal sponsors, bless them -- I donate regularly to @conservancy -- are providing the community with essential services, as proven by the projects signing up with them, but I think they're also doing work that is overhead and workarounds to the fact that we don't have good ways to fund free software, or at least not all free software (Ibryam's Tokenomics article has examples of successful and pretty direct methods that work for some). This is exactly the space where https://fractalide.com/fractalmarket/ will make a difference, by connecting users to free software products, and through our component model even distributing funds to those essential core components that everybody uses but nobody uses directly. We're imagining a future where a project like OpenSSL won't be in the situation where it is used by a billion people, but funded largely by the volunteer work of one person. If a component is on Fractalmarket, and it's used by another component, and that component is used by an application, and somebody pays for that application, we want to make sure that a fair fraction of that payment reaches the component at the bottom of that graph.