to be clear: in the blog post I wasn’t remotely proposing that governments should determine the technical details of the projects to be funded. But instead the

to be clear: in the blog post I wasn’t remotely proposing that governments should determine the technical details of the projects to be funded. But instead the projects which empirically support public infrastructure can apply for maintenance funding. For instance “xz is used to compress packages for these ubiquitous OSes. please can I get $$K/y for security audits and to cover my time to work on PRs”. So you would still have the competition for the best tech to get popular and become public infra. But you would be protected against the paradox that the more successful and ubiquitous FOSS projects get, the more they are taken for granted, and the less their maintenance is funded: “I didn’t have to pay for this thing to exist in the first place; why should I start paying for its maintenance now?”