Companies have long sponsored (or hired) individuals to work on FLOSS, but I think we could go a lot further. If we could make it part of the culture of (scaling) companies / funding ecosystems to say "when we reach X revenue, we're going to hire /sponsor 5 people to work on FLOSS stuff full time." Obviously, these companies will have more incentive to sponsor people who work on software they use heavily (which should stay the first priority, as it makes a lot of sense), but it'd be great to take it to the next level and have them hire people who work on useful / popular software that they don't use everyday (directly) or doesn't have much to do with their bottom line. This could include 'adjunct' software work like package repository maintainers and writers of documentation for these projects.
If it wasn't one-offs and outliers, but just something that companies did as part of getting big, we'd have a lot less need for periodic emergency fundraisers, and fewer stories about "important software X that's about to lose its sole maintainer(s)."
If it wasn't one-offs and outliers, but just something that companies did as part of getting big, we'd have a lot less need for periodic emergency fundraisers, and fewer stories about "important software X that's about to lose its sole maintainer(s)."