Funding all of these deep dependencies may have helped in this case but wouldn't address the root of the problem, which is that every business out there runs enormous amounts of unsandboxed third party code. Funding may have helped xz specifically from falling to pressure to switch to a malicious maintainer, but it does nothing about the very real risk that any one of the tens of thousands of projects we depend on has always been a long con.

The solution here has to be some combination of a dramatic cut back on the number of individual projects we rely on and well-audited technical solutions that treat all code—even FOSS dependencies—as potentially malicious and sandboxes it accordingly.