[dunkelheit]

Lack of financial support is not the whole story (there is a lot of blog posts declaring burnout written by very well-paid developers) but I agree that it is an important part.

The problem is that open-source software is a quintessential public good (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics) ). Markets fail to properly incentivize creation of public goods and the free-rider problem arises. One approach to tackle this problem that is currently promoted by Glen Weyl and Vitalik Buterin is called quadratic funding (https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/12/07/quadratic.html). Basically the idea is that anyone can contribute a donation to some project and it will be matched using funds from a common pool in such amount as to ensure that the value you get from the project completion is commensurate to the donation amount. Probably not a silver bullet but the idea looks interesting and I like that they are experimenting on small but real-world problems (such as funding open-source projects for the Ethereum ecosystem) instead of just theorizing.