I'm going with a hot take: these kinds of products should be supported by tax dollars, not with individual donators/payers. The market doesn't solve the problem of public goods, it just makes it worse.
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Those are the problems that every govt funded project faces, but they are particularly tough in software. We have many examples where it went very wrong so not many governments acting in good faith are eager to step into it. And you can't allow the government to intervene in development or management here, because this how you'll end up with government-mandated preinstalled browser on smart phones or with added backdoors.
One solution could be participatory budgeting where the end users will directly decide where to invest part of their govt-collected taxes. E.g., on your declaration you'd have a field where you'd like to invest X% of your paid taxes into project Y. This comes with its own set of challenges and admin overhead, but I don't see any other good solution for cases like this, because they are impossible to run under direct government control.
You don't. The state doesn't know what a project needs at a given time, and will try to apply cookie cutter solutions when they don't need it. What you actually do is two parts:
- Give a budget for each institution to spend on open source projects (defined by some industry criteria, or something)
- Force institutions to consider open source projects for free (as in no cost) digital goods, and a report as to why open source solutions when paying for a digital good or service. The later should be evaluated by a central organization that promotes the rational use of digital products, like the U.S. Digital Service, EU Digital Services Directorate, Digital Transformation Agency, European Data Innovation Board, Secretaria de Governo Digital, etc.
These two policies in conjunction would supply projects with the cash needed and foment projects to do useful things.