That is already how it works. The loner hacker in moms basement working for free on his super critical OSS package is largely a myth. The vast majority of OSS code is contributed by companies paying their employees to work on it.
The sad truth about open source in 2026 is that it does not serve the society the way it is advertised or did back in the 90s.
I'm thinking of projects like curl [0]
this is a cornerstone of modern software development. If it died, or if got taken over by a malicious entity, every single company on the planet would have an immediate security problem. Yet the experience of that maintainer is bad verging on terrible [1].
We need to do better than this.
[0] https://curl.se/docs/governance.html
[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/1034966/