Comment by imtringued

That's actually not the problem. The problem is that the conventional funding model for open source does not make sense and nobody has the resources to provide a financial product that actually works, since the projects with a single maintainer are too small of a market to be worth serving for classic financial institutions like banks.

The business model is as follows: Open source maintenance produces recurring costs (developer salary, infrastructure costs, etc) but these costs are fixed and do not scale with the number of users, only with the development effort. This means the ideal financing structure would be a cost plus system where the maintainer gets paid a salary and the customers (businesses) are spreading the cost among each other so that each business ends up paying less than if they had built or maintained the project in-house.

The problem here is that the costs are variable and depend on the number of participants and their individual willingness to spend money and how that effects the viability of the project as a whole. Participating businesses need some sort of guarantee that they won't be stuck with all of the costs and that there are other participants who will chip in. At the same time, once there is a sufficient number of participants, the participating businesses don't want to overpay. They may commit to a monthly worst case bill of $5000, but if the total bill is $10000 and there are 100 participating businesses so that each business could only pay $100, said big spender would want the option to lower their spending down to $100 if possible and let others carry more of the financial burden.

With this sort of arrangement, funding open source software would be rational, since the amount you save by freeloading is insignificant compared to the risk of the project being discontinued due to freeloading.