Well, every time this line of thinking comes up, I don't believe there is a gofundme, indiegogo, patreon, etc to which I could donate. Because I for sure think that would be a good investment for future generations, but you are correct that I almost certainly couldn't convince my employer to spend the money. I'd guess that's partially because they don't directly benefit from qemu, setting aside the daily use of buildkit which for sure does. Come to think of it, I'd guess Docker(Mirantis?) is BY FAR the most "you really, really should be a corporate sponsor" of qemu

Well, you can donate to the project (there's a paypal link at the bottom of https://www.qemu.org/sponsors/ which donates to the Software Freedom Conservancy earmarking it as being for QEMU), *but* doing that won't cause somebody to be paid to work on the project (it can cover random project expenses like CI usage, I think). Mostly our sponsorship is either "in-kind" (access to compute hosts, hosting downloads, cloud compute credits etc) or else is sponsorship to help pay for the annual KVM Forum conference.

In general there is no mechanism for "pay money to have work happen" because pretty much all non-hobbyist QEMU developers are doing it because they're paid by some company (RedHat, Linaro, etc etc etc) to do that work as their full time job. So they're not in the market for random small side jobs.