[SkipperCat]

Isn't this what the "Freemium" model is supposed to resolve? If a open source package is popular, people will build businesses around it and people who use it can then purchase support and get bonus features.

This allows the marketplace to determine which project get supported rather than bureaucratic decree.

[securesaml]

It's usually the more user-facing products that can thrive on this freemium model (probably full web apps or a lot of code). For example, laravel might get a lot of funding from this.

However, the underlying infrastructure libraries, will not get any funding from this, even though they have much more users. For example, libxml2, xzutils, http parser ...

You can't build any product off of an infrastructure library, purchasing support doesn't make sense, and there are little bonus features to be made.

One way to remedy this, is to have well funded open source projects take ownership of its dependencies.