So far nearly all FLOSS projects was built without money from someone, simply the users offer resources, every university offer mirrors, most large companies using some FLOSS project donate resources to the project.
At some point in time this disappear, maybe when most actors decide to ditch their own operation for someone else "the cloud", and as a result there are no spare resources to support FLOSS. Similarly the FLOSS community became thin, quarrelsome, not really supported etc.
This is why many say the FLOSS ecosystem is dead because there aren't anymore FLOSS model contributors. The current state of FLOSS is mostly big corp show embracing the model because they need pre-existing sw developed and licensed this way.
Personally I have nothing against mil-tech sponsorship, I'm deeply against the absence of a FLOSS model. The Ops-less state of things, where no one own it's infra, have iron and so on, is a terrible vulnerability waiting catastrophic detonation and Nix/Guix success and failures are in the same line: most people get convinced that's normal to have a system based on paravirtualisation, they see nothing strange in downloading pre-built docker images for anything, run k8s on a single homeserver and so on.
We are loosing knowledge trying mimicking GAFAM model witch is archaic and anti-users, and it's built especially for that, to lock in people, these days even mentally, since so many see no vulnerabilities in using for instance GitHub not as a mere repo host but for PR/CI and so on, even if we have witnessed bans, massive geo-bans and so on. We have a big slice of people unable to visualize the dangerous IT mess we are in.
At some point in time this disappear, maybe when most actors decide to ditch their own operation for someone else "the cloud", and as a result there are no spare resources to support FLOSS. Similarly the FLOSS community became thin, quarrelsome, not really supported etc.
This is why many say the FLOSS ecosystem is dead because there aren't anymore FLOSS model contributors. The current state of FLOSS is mostly big corp show embracing the model because they need pre-existing sw developed and licensed this way.
Personally I have nothing against mil-tech sponsorship, I'm deeply against the absence of a FLOSS model. The Ops-less state of things, where no one own it's infra, have iron and so on, is a terrible vulnerability waiting catastrophic detonation and Nix/Guix success and failures are in the same line: most people get convinced that's normal to have a system based on paravirtualisation, they see nothing strange in downloading pre-built docker images for anything, run k8s on a single homeserver and so on.
We are loosing knowledge trying mimicking GAFAM model witch is archaic and anti-users, and it's built especially for that, to lock in people, these days even mentally, since so many see no vulnerabilities in using for instance GitHub not as a mere repo host but for PR/CI and so on, even if we have witnessed bans, massive geo-bans and so on. We have a big slice of people unable to visualize the dangerous IT mess we are in.
Nix community in storm is just a symptom.