I don't have a horse in the game and I'm not familiar with these people or the "fiasco" but your summary does not seem like accurate description of the issues raised in [5]. Here are the quotes that give me a very different take on the situation:
The money was raised specifically to support development of requests 3
> [Reitz] announced that work had begun on "Requests 3", that its headline feature would be the native async/await support I was working on, and that he was seeking donations to make this happen.
It's not so much that PSF needed to be used, as that there needed to be some accountability as to how those funds were used.
> [Reitz] chose a fundraiser structure that avoids standard accountability mechanisms he was familiar with. He never had any plan or capability to deliver what he promised. And when I offered a way for him to do it anyway, he gave me some bafflegab about how expensive it is to write docs. Effectively, his public promises about how he would use the Requests 3 money were lies from start to finish, and he hasn't shown any remorse or even understanding that this is a problem.
It sounds like a great deal of the work being done on requests is done by volunteers but the funding only goes to support Reitz
> I think a lot of people don't realize how little Reitz actually has to do with Requests development. For many years now, actual maintenance has been done almost exclusively by other volunteers. If you look at the maintainers list on PyPI, you'll see he doesn't have PyPI rights to his own project, because he kept breaking stuff, so the real maintainers insisted on revoking his access. If you clone the Requests git repo, you can run git log requests/ to see a list of every time someone changed the library's source code, either directly or by merging someone else's pull request. The last time Reitz did either was in May 2017, when he made some whitespace cleanups.
The issue is not so much that money is being made, but the way that it is done and the lack of accountability
> I don't have any objection to trying to make money from open-source. I've written before about how open-source doesn't get nearly enough investment. I do object to exploiting volunteers, driving out community members, and lying to funders and the broader community. Reitz has a consistent history of doing all these things.