I agree anyone competent enough to run a good FOSS project from their savings will face a daily temptation of abandoning their precarious existence for a substantial secure income working at a corporate job. And I agree also that it is problematical how to divide donations to a project when there are multiple contributors (especially versus donations to specific developers, but even that is problematic if a multi-person project is involved). I also agree on the need for building a community around a project.
Where we differ regarding the BI and FOSS is possibly in thinking in these areas:
* There are many small but important projects (Mithril, Vue, many others -- even Linux early on) which are initially the work of one developer, eventually supported by a community. A BI would make more such starts possible, and also make contributions more feasible. While it is not quite "if you build it, they will come", certainly there are a lot of cases where a good project, well supported by one person, makes a big difference to a lot of people. Khan Academy in its early years is another great example of this.
* There is an entire gift economy of volunteerism. In some ways, much economic activity in even the USA is voluntary (even if it is ignored in the GDP) when you consider child care, helping neighbors, volunteering at non-profits, conversing with strangers to share knowledge, and so on. So, I know it is possible.
* Regarding "most people" and "some people": If you multiple seven billion people on the planet times even 0.1% of people being civic-minded at any particular time (and the percentage is probably much higher), then you get 7 million people. That is still a lot of people who can put a lot of time into things. And even without a BI, Clay Skirky said, there is a lot of time that could be liberated for improving free software and free content:
https://web.archive.org/web/20110102193349/http://www.shirky...
"Two hundred billion hours [of TV watching], in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus."
The bottom line is that the way people make a lot of money is by standing between someone and something they want and asking for a toll to access that thing. Almost all venture business models are based on some variation of that (or aspire to that such rent seeking). It's not the only way to make money, but it is the way to make a lot of money. The problem is that tolls have lots of external costs. For tolls at bridges there are delays, health costs of fumes, and increased risks of accidents. For online software, there is the externality of lost privacy (but only one-way, consumer to aggregator) needed to make possible the tolls Google and Facebook charge advertisers as they sell human eyeballs. There is also the externality of risks from central points of failure (whether loss of service or censorship).
Small-scale exchange commerce may make a lot of capitalistic sense at the scale of, say, running a local farm, bagel shop, or plumbing company. But on a large scale, like Facebook, Google, Slack, and so on, the centralization of control of information flows poses enormous risks to democracy.
If there was not so much regulatory capture, we might expect our governments to pour literally trillions of dollars a year into software (and content) for democracy right now given how important that is. Instead we have a proprietary centralized Facebook, Google, Twitter, and even Windows -- and our democracy and culture is at great risk from an imbalance of power. Governments at the behest of content publishers have continually expanded copyright and passed ever more draconian laws about sharing information. And every day we get more funding pouring into the next venture (like Slack) that can figure out how to capture and centralize more information and data mine it for the benefit of the investors.
For a latest example of how Slack continues to invest in data minining alll the secrets of coprorations:
https://medium.com/@noah_weiss/starting-up-slack-s-search-le...
As we move into an age of AI, the emphasis on monopolistic business models is even more dangerous. It's bad enough to have a communications system shaped by short-term greed and competition -- it is far, far worse to have autonomous inhuman AIs shaped by short-term greed and competition let loose on the net.
I wrote an essay relate to such funding trends over a decade ago, with a section on automotive intelligence:
http://pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html#w...
Of course, ultimately, there are lots of moral failures all around. If people had rejected Facebook or Slack from the start, the world online might be a very different place.
But, in the words of Marc Zuckerberg: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks
Now, we all need to trust other people in this world to have a happy life. But in a democracy, the idea is to spread that trust around as much as is feasible and have checks and balances. There is also the notion of incrementally earned trust -- and also the recall of trust (like impeachment).
But how do we impeach Facebook, Slack, Google, or Equifax? In our society, we can't. The best we can do is create alternatives.
Instead of centralized proprietary services like Facebook or Slack, we could instead have shared standards (e.g. email, IRC, or what comes next) and a variety of implementers of those standards. But if all the techies are being paid by VC to work for Facebook or Slack or the next similar service, that creates a vacuum of developers working on better email or better IRC standards (and implementations).
We may benefit from some hierarchy, but we also benefit from having that mixed with some meshwork (as Manuel De Landa suggests: http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm ).
There are several options for moving forward -- a Basic Income is just one of them. Maybe there can be better business models that affirm democracy. And maybe there can be more court rulings protecting democracy. And maybe there can be more collective investment by government and foundations in FOSS. (One other place I suggest that is here, suggesting the intelligence community fund FOSS intelligence tools: http://web.archive.org/web/20160508005451/http://pcast.ideas... ) But we may not get there if we believe a conventional rent-seeking business model is the only way to fund most software and communication services.