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A thought occurs to me that maybe public software could be funded by the public, via taxation. I don't think that would be any kind of panacea, because you can see what happens with other publicly funded things, but it's worth consideration - especially if public software is considered vital to the rest of the economy.

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Great idea in theory, but as you fear I think this would quickly be bastardized into more private military-industrial complex funding.

I would expect a tax-funded OpenSSL to be developed mostly in secret, in cooperation with the NSA, to be extremely expensive to develop/maintain, and to most definitely have backdoors.

Yes, I think you're right. It is probably better for most public software to be independently produced, outside of the context of companies or governments.

Another way to tackle the problem might be to ensure that people who want to make public software have the time to do so, because that's usually the main limiting factor with any sort of volunteering.

You could think of the proposal behind Snowdrift.coop as being the closest we could get to effect purely-voluntary taxation… Of course, if we had better real democracy to set better tax law, well…

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