I deeply dislike this framing of mega corps vs volunteer devs. It conveniently ignores the huge amount of open source being developed by regular salaried devs as part of their job. Imho that is what we need more of instead of trying to redirect some money to these individuals which to me seems inherently unstable approach.

To make that happen I think companies should be more willing to develop and publish their own patches instead of relying on upstream for anything. Overall I think in the open source world the idea of (centralized upstream) "project" has gotten way overinflated.