I think Los Alamos National Laboratory did something similar back in 2007/2008 and concluded that gas prices at the pump would have to exceed $4.60 before it could compete. https://www.greencarcongress.c...

> #2. Pay one of their developers to backport the patch to the last "production" version.

Often it is far less than obvious who/where you would pay and what you could expect for the effort. If someone could come up with a project to make that obvious the economy of open source would become more efficient. Of course that project would first be applied to itself, (dis-)proving its own viabilty.