When I worked for the UK Government I was once asked if we could find a way to pay for all the Open Source Software we were using. It is a surprisingly hard problem and I want to talk about some of the issues we faced. The UK Government publishes a lot of Open Source code - nearly everything developed in-house by the state is available under an OSI Approved licence. The UK is generally pretty…
Why not just offer to pay for specific features? There are existing platforms where users can vote on features they want and pay developers to implement them. If the government wants to support projects they should participate by founding desired features. This way there’s no risk that they will take over the direction of the project.