How many billions or trillions of market value are built upon foundational technology like this, while the maintainers have to go begging for funds not for themselves, but for the good of the project(s)?
A policy in tech companies to grant a given amount (let say 50$) per month to each employee, the employee can attribute this amount to whichever OSS project(s) he sees fit.
If the employee doesn't chose a project, this amount is given to OSS projects in need.
To streamline this, the ideal would be to have a service where everything could be done:
* OSS projects register to it
* Tech Companies then give the money to the service, which then dispatch it to the OSS projects
* Employees of tech companies logs into the service to select which projects they chose to give money to (with maybe some suggestion to avoid over/under funding projects).
Let's make that amount dependent on the employee's salary. Not 50$ per employee per month, but e.g. salary for 1 hour per employee per month. Salaries vary a lot between countries (and even within countries).
As someone who runs a small open source project that clearly states that Patreon donations are accepted and even offers some convenience benefits to donors, I often see people jumping extra hoops to avoid it, including clearly profitable companies that saved many thousands by using my software, spending extra time that would amount to more than those donations. So far I get donations from less than one percent of my estimated users.
Facebook, microsoft, github, etc all pay $$ and our time into a pool that is used to incentivize the finding, vetting and fixing of security flaws in major software running the internet.
PS: are EcmaScript binaries actually a thing?
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-worlds-email-encrypti...
for example (at least that one has a happy ending - where after the right exposure a bunch of companies benefiting from his work stepped in to fund it...)