‘support’ can take the form of financial support, in which case anyone who would be able to pay for SaaSS subscriptions or proprietary software would only have

‘support’ can take the form of financial support, in which case anyone who would be able to pay for SaaSS subscriptions or proprietary software would only have to do something very similar here. The biggest problem there is that the social infrastructure and coordination points don't seem to exist, and that's a place where the fragmentation probably does hit badly, where consolidating users' needs more would let development be much more efficient and coordinated in such a way that crowd financial support would become more economically plausible at least. Of course, there's the free-rider game-theoretic issue, among other things… While there's a lot of issues between “where are are now” and “broadly end-user-friendly libre software support models being common enough to be recognizable and repeatable”, “sure, so long as you can code” isn't meant to be the first answer. It's just become a cultural laughing-point because a lot of people do ignore the issues, and “you can choose whom you ask to handle the code” requires more work on the environment to be practical. IME, “exclusionary mindset” usually has little to do with it. The “VCs have conditioned people to never pay for software, so you may have to have massive scale and run on surveillance capitalism to survive” and “user model of technology being vertically integrated service by default” are of course a whole other environmental game which may crush attempts to make this work.