For 20-somethimg years I've been following this search for Open Source funding. It's kinda like the holy grail, or perhaps more like an attempt at an unholy all

For 20-somethimg years I've been following this search for Open Source funding. It's kinda like the holy grail, or perhaps more like an attempt at an unholy alliance. On the one hand you have a primarily communistic enterprise (in the sense that it is developed in community, for community.) On the other hand it is developed by individuals who answer to no-one, and live in a capitalistic society. Politically speaking, this sort of public-good is typically govt funded. Like a road or bridge. But that implies govt control - they decide who gets built, by whom, and where and what. Whereas developers decide what to build, what to add, when, how, and so on. So on the one hand you have a zillion free agents, just making up whatever they like. (do we _really_ need another text editor, or JavaScript color picker?) On the other hand we want centralised funding for "open source". In which case who decides which projects are winners and which are losers? No, no, we should limit funding to individuals and individual projects. If only every Linux user who give $10 a year to the Linux foundation. And $10 to OpenSSL and $10 each to a hundred other projects... Except this model simply doesn't work. Oh wait, corporations - they have plenty of money. We don't need individuals, we need companies to pony up. How about say 1% if annual profits. But how to share the pot? If I release a fork of jQuery can I get a share? So we have altruistic developers, most of whom are making complete crap [1], wanting the market to figure out the winners and losers based on quality, and somehow the cream will rise. But the "market" pays nothing, except what ever they want to whoever the want? I'm slowly losing hope that these two systems can be reconciled. They seem, idealogically, to repel each other. The very freedoms baked into Open Source and Free Software seem to preclude all efforts to keep software both Open, and profitable. [1] most-all software is crap, commercial or open source.