Snowdrift.coop is an interesting idea but I'm not sure how well it would work in practice. If you consider his example of improving on open SSL I guess you'd get a bunch of companies saying we'll chip in say $10k as long as other companies do too. Then assuming that happens you'd have a
money to pay some developers but that might not actually result in a better SSL. Just raising money does not necessarily produce good software.
In practice a lot of stuff seems to get funded by corporate sponsors or corporations just building stuff and making it open. Examples -
Rust - funded by Mozilla and perhaps the project most likely to lead to better SSL and similar?
Go, V8 etc - Google
OpenSSL - contributed to by Nokia, Huawei and others
Ongoing donations helps with accountability. But otherwise, funding isn't a guarantee or anything. But if you look at where good software is, really good and robust, you don't find it from totally underfunded projects. Mozilla is way better funded than most other free/open software.
In practice a lot of stuff seems to get funded by corporate sponsors or corporations just building stuff and making it open. Examples -
Rust - funded by Mozilla and perhaps the project most likely to lead to better SSL and similar?
Go, V8 etc - Google
OpenSSL - contributed to by Nokia, Huawei and others
Maybe Snowdrift can do better? Maybe not?