Software should be maintained in an almost private trust model imo. Pay upfront for the license which generates a bunch of money for the developer upfront. That

Software should be maintained in an almost private trust model imo. Pay upfront for the license which generates a bunch of money for the developer upfront. That money along with all future revenues from new licenses are put into a trust that grows over time and is used to pay salaries for maintainers and to pay for server hardware. Maybe if you own your own hardware you could even have a side business of leasing your spare compute capacity and that perhaps could cover its costs.