Can I be fair & frank?

Your article does raise a few great points... about Github specifically. But not about funding sustainable OSS development in general.

Open source also is not a business model. It's a principle that relates to intellectual rights and copyright: the author explicitly stating that they won't exercise their rights as to what others do with their work, provided then that others share any modifications under the same terms of use. That's open source in a nutshell.

The direct implication, then, is that any business model that hinges on selling licenses that give a very restricted permission on the use of (a copy of) the software, is excluded. Which is exactly how games and products from Adobe or Microsoft are sold: you buy a license - a permission from the original author - to use the software.

Github itself has never been a marketplace to sell software. There are no affordances that allows anyone to sell and buy license keys or whatever. It's always been a descendant in the spirit of SourceForge or Freshmeat: a platform for hosting codebases via version control. No more, no less. Github pushes open source as a matter of principle because it's - above all - excellent marketing that doesn't need complex tooling: simply adding a LICENSE.md file with the GPL or MIT license is already enough.

Open source is not flawed, as you state. It's above all a principled choice you make. And it's a choice you make depending on the type of value you want to extract from the project you're writing.

In your article, you are lamenting the low income numbers from publishing code under an open source license on Github. Well, ask yourself this: Maybe it's not open source that's flawed, but the other way around: The tools you choose to extract value not fitting your expectations. If you really want to monetize software, then maybe you're better off looking into a closed source license and a platform that does allow you to sell license keys. Much like what Sublime or InteliJ and such do.

It's true though that funding Open Source projects is problematic. But this has always been true for any non-profit venture: Ranging from charity, culture, environmentalist causes or other types of citizen activism that doesn't involve setting up a private business. Open Source software is no exception, and unless you're able to charge for consultancy or derivative products (e.g. a service build on top of OSS software), you're funding options are very much limited to grants, philanthropy or donations.

Nadia Eghbal did an excellent study for the Ford Foundation that sums up the issues with funding open source nicely: Roads & Bridges, the unseen labor behind our digital infrastructure:

https://www.fordfoundation.org/work/learning/research-report...

It's a recommended read on this topic.

Beyond that, the pool & wallet solution you're proposing is above all an attempt to incentivise a specific type of funding: private, individual donations. I think it's a great idea in it's own right, and something worth considering. But it should be clear that it's a far cry from a silver bullet that will solve the disparity between the many profiting from labor of a few against a low financial reward for their efforts.

Personally, I think that if you're willing to work on your own open source projects, you have to mindful that you exclude the possibility to directly derive wealth from what you've build.

It's up to you then to figure out the alternatives: e.g. selling training, workshops, support,... or maybe getting hired by a company who are willing to let you work part time on your OSS project, or getting publicly funded because your project caters to the public good (e.g. culture, health, education, mobility,...)