The sustainable route for open source projects is individuals being paid by an company to implement functionality that the employer wants in a given project, and then being obligated under the license to share those changes. Those individuals could be employees of the company, or contractors, including the person who wrote the software in the first place.

I think in the minds of many, software patents are the means of getting people to disclose their source. But they currently don't work that way anywhere.

(edit: actually IIRC it's fine to sometimes promote what you're doing on HN, so long as it's not Every Single Post) . Can you tell us a bit more?

Open Source Projects should take inspiration from how companies pay people. There are some very good ideas in how companies distribute revenues and compensate individuals. We just need to take the best parts of this approach and blend them with our open-source principles, and we will have the best of both worlds.

To be fair a huge portion of the open source code being used by industry comes from industry.

Don't get me wrong though I love me a good open source project. I think the idea of being compensated might increase the quality, but let's point fingers at github. It would be as simple as adding a "support contributors" button on repos.

I don't know how divide the winnings fairly. But it should be possible.

Wait a second, where is it said that those 75% were made by volunteers and not by for example the many companies contributing to the Linux kernel?