What it reminds me of, is my reoccuring thought, not just about open source but including this aspect, that we've built up a society based on software, that we could literally only afford because we've done it unsustainably. The economy could not bear the costs of producing all this software in an actual reliable sustainable way. So... now what.
It might be a good idea for governments to coordinate with computing advocacy groups/associations (e.g. German CCC, NANOG, popular Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Arch)... set up a fund of maybe 10 million euros, have the associations identify critical, shared components, and work out funding with their core developers. 10M a year should fund anything from 100-200 developers (assuming European wages), that should be more than enough, and it's pocket change for the G20 nations.
If that's too much bureaucracy or people fear that governments might exert undue influence: hand the money to universities, go back to the roots - many (F)OSS projects started out in universities after all. Only issue there is that projects may end up like OpenStack in the end ;)
