A lot of the time our hopes for funding critical FLOSS infrastructure has been benevolent billionaires: Google or Meta or Mark Shuttleworth or whoever is supposed to pay for things to happen. Then lately we have seen some government grant programs which are ... fine but come with strings and issues attached that I don't want to get into here. Also they tend to focus on the server side and security and whatnot. It kinda does not scale for each individual to pay for all the projects: 1 EUR Patreon for this lib here, 5 bucks for that application there ... Things get unwieldy and expensive and leads to people not doing it at all. Here's a dumb idea I had a few days ago while running: Set up an org that's focused on supporting FLOSS end-user apps/environments. Like browsers, maybe a Wordpress fork to get that out of the hands of the "AI" people. You can become a member with a monthly "subscription". Like your Netflix/Spotify/etc. The organization distributes funds in a transparent way with a long-term focus (easier said than done, I know). And no, you can't and shouldn't enforce this, FLOSS should also be available to people who can't pay, that is important. But by collecting like 10 or 15 bucks by a whole bunch of people you could build a bit of a fund that's not at the whim of one state, one billionaire or something. Probably stupid.