Coding horror asks a good question about using the financial sponsorship model to support FOSS:

“…aggregated sponsorship system hasn’t naturally evolved on its own by now…”

Here are the problems I see:

1. People are not giving enough money, even if it is pooled. – You need some experts to make reasonable time and cost estimates
2. There is no methood to give real money, and return it if not completed – You need to collect real money at the time of the request, and be able to return it if no developer claims it.
3. There is no standard for “complete”. There are crazy people out there that will never certify completion because they regret committing the money. – An impartial third party is required to determine “completed”, and issue payment.

Overall, there is a whole, non-trival, business in this. It *could* work, and it would work well with the major corporations taking part in the market.

I worry there are two limits to the growth of technology:

1) The fossil fuel based economy has freed humans from work. If the decline of these resources is too fast, humans may never achieve a level of technology to sustain itself on renewables. In that case, less machines can be run because of limited energy, more bodies (and minds) will be required to compensate for the less machinery, less technical progress will result from the less available minds, and so on, in an positive feedback loop until we are unable to maintain our current level of technology, and we fall back into the dark ages. Only this time we will never emerge from those dark ages again because there are no more fossil fuels to be had. Maybe a lack of terrestrial resources is the reason for Fermi’s Paradox; the galaxy seems devoid of intelligent life because there is not enough stored energy on the planets to support them.

2) Absolute human intelligence could be the growth limiter. If no humans, or set of humans, are intelligent enough to create and artificial intelligence greater than our own, then we are limited in what software we can make. Software will continue to advance in the artistic sense, but will stagnate in the technical sense. I humbly suggest we may be witness to this now; web browsing is now over 15years old. Web 2.0 is simply recreating client server apps from the 90’s (or even 80’s). The software is not technically more sophisticated, it is only doing things it could not do before with slower machines. Just like the building architects: their trade is not getting technically better, only their choice of materials is.