While this is great brainstorming, that doesn't mean it's a viable business plan. Having a large highly qualified dev-team working on experimental stuff for no

While this is great brainstorming, that doesn't mean it's a viable business plan. Having a large highly qualified dev-team working on experimental stuff for now over a decade and no likelihood of completion anytime soon and without a business plan is pretty tricky, even for a non-profit. In general, for research of that type (of scale) it doesn't strike me as generally very viable to rely on commercial support, and such a niche technicality is surely not going to collect enough donations to run on that alone. If we want to fund this because it's an interesting option for the future in the long term, governments are going to need to chip in - and it looks like that's at least partly at play here (or even primarily), i.e.: system working as designed.