This got me thinking. If one want to start an open source project which requires a lot of manpower like this, where to get the funding to start the project? Sta

This got me thinking. If one want to start an open source project which requires a lot of manpower like this, where to get the funding to start the project? Starting without funding means you'll have to gather a team of unpaid contributors, and for big projects like Alpine, you'll probably need to gather a lot of them. How these big open source projects got bootstrapped?