I'd love to see a more agile open source funding model: something like a freelancer collective that can draw together developers and share the admin and funding tasks. I.e. a platform, but a bit smaller in context, perhaps just for the sake of local tax rules. Re. the source of these funds (hinted it will come in a future article,) it makes more sense to expect companies to share their revenue, than to hope for donations from consumers.<p>There's also the other type of sustainability that has been shrinking as VCs make open-source a buzzword: contributions. I've seen more and more projects launch to great fanfare, and some years later close contributions, and perhaps even the issue tracker, because they are a small team. This leads to fragmentation, which leads to higher maintenance costs for the community as a whole.<p>Sure, the source is available, so a contribution to society has been made, but by doing so, you also become the "town square" where people expect to go to contribute. Perhaps the problem here is that the public VCS repositories should not only have PRs, but a list of contributed 3P patches without the expectation they will be merged, but they can easily be auto-tested against trunk, and patch authors be notified of breakages.