This kind of situation where there is a common need for something, but there isn't a reasonable way to pay for it in individual transactions has a traditional s

This kind of situation where there is a common need for something, but there isn't a reasonable way to pay for it in individual transactions has a traditional solution: make the project publicly funded. As an example, a military is a useful thing to have for protection, but paying for it as some sort of subscription or "per-invasion" billing is obviously not a realistic solution. So we fun it publicly, as a tax, which generally works[1]. Similarly, it might be useful to make a publicly-funded service that is charged with creating software infrastructure such as TLS or even libc that are difficult to fund directly. There are a few advantages to using public funds: unlike traditional Free Software, as it uses public funds, the output would be public domain, and usable by anybody, commercial uses included. Also, as it doesn't have to worry about VC money drying up or "maximizing shareholder value", it would be easier to stick to a mandate that emphasizes quality instead of time-to-market. On the other hand, problems with this idea would be the general concerns about corruption due to political meddling, and how to keep the NSA from pulling a BULLRUN on it like they did to NIST. <speculation> Perhaps a "dept. of software infrastructure" could take over the "defense" side that the NSA seems to be neglecting recently. Moving all industry interaction (and trust) over to the new, open group so the NSA was known as spying-only might improve the relationship a bit... </speculation> I'm not sure if this is a particularly good solution to the problem, but it's worth considering. [1] Of course, there are details to argue over and bugs in the system to fix, just like any complicated project.