In the case of open source, that algorithm usually identifies volunteers. Sometimes it identifies businesses. Sometimes people come up with clever ways of funding projects (Red Hat the enterprise was genius from this perspective, they organised a solution to tragedy of the commons in core infrastructure and made a lot of money doing that).
I suspect there does need to be a regular social renewal to resolve the tragedy of the commons problem. I expect that the network of OSS foundations and companies will regularly becomes corrupt and ineffective and need to be purged then replaced. That implies there is a fine line of healthy complaining - people need to communicate where the problems are by complaining, but it is useless trying to blame people like kernel maintainers for poor testing. It is good to stop and appreciate how beautiful the dance is; this is one of the purest free markets we have in the world and it is pretty amazing how well it hangs together since it looks like a hearty sneeze could bring the whole thing down.