The problem there is, if Google donated $7.5 million (15,000 engineers * $500) to the Eclipse Foundation, that would certainly give the impression that Google had an unfair amount of influence on the direction of project, compared to a small company only paying a couple of hundred $ (or an open source developer, not paying anything at all).
I think that goes directly against what you say is the primary benefit of open source: that no one company has an undue amount of influence on the product.
I think it's much better that they contribute a few engineering resources directly to the product, rather than just handing over money. That way, they're guaranteed to be engaging directly in the open source "process".
In the case of Eclipse, I think you're missing that IBM is already the dominant contributor, and that indeed the project originated from them.
So I doubt anyone is going to accuse Google of trying to purchase influence.
But, it's an open source project, people and companies are free to contribute as much as they like or not at all. I don't use Eclipse regularly at the moment, but I have in the past and so I'm grateful to everyone who has supported it.
I'm especially grateful for this particular donation, because one of the reasons I don't like to use Eclipse is its sluggishness (although anecdotally I do think it has gotten faster and more stable in recent years, and it doesn't seem any worse than Visual Studio in this regard).
I think that goes directly against what you say is the primary benefit of open source: that no one company has an undue amount of influence on the product.
I think it's much better that they contribute a few engineering resources directly to the product, rather than just handing over money. That way, they're guaranteed to be engaging directly in the open source "process".