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Yeah, I donate from time to time to various projects. But voluntary contributions will never solve this issue.

I had in mind somehow requiring or rewarding everyone to pay a small amount. Like, anyone who uses software from a platform such as GitHub should pay a subscription fee for maintenance depending on usage. It could be small so that it doesn’t interfere with usage. Considering huge number of users, that could pay for maintainers.

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We already have that, it's called paid/proprietary software

That’s mostly different.

The point is, there are large number of users, if each user pays a small amount to the platform, they won’t notice it, yet it accumulates to a maintenance fee.

Paying a maintenance fee makes sense, regardless of how you label it. The entirely free software has problems and may not be sustainable.

That is not at all what they said. Your interpretation seems disingenuous.

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