There is another fundamental problem with this idea: the planning work that needs to be done to figure out what to program with this patronage is itself a lot of work. Project management, requirements analysis, design, testing, installation, configuration, administration: when done properly, is far, far more work than the programming itself.
And nobody ever wants to pay for it. Customers buying SAS don't want to pay for it. Managers at closed-source, boxed-software companies mostly don't want to pay for it. Managers at consultancies don't want to pay for it, because clients bitch and scream about paying for it (and then bitch and scream when the software sucks because of a lack of it).
Everyone has this mentality that the only thing worth paying for is the programmer's fingers pushing keys on a keyboard into a code file. Either a sea-change on how people view work is necessary, or we need to learn to recast all that other work as programming in some way.
Unfortunately, I don't see either of those happening anytime soon.
And nobody ever wants to pay for it. Customers buying SAS don't want to pay for it. Managers at closed-source, boxed-software companies mostly don't want to pay for it. Managers at consultancies don't want to pay for it, because clients bitch and scream about paying for it (and then bitch and scream when the software sucks because of a lack of it).
Everyone has this mentality that the only thing worth paying for is the programmer's fingers pushing keys on a keyboard into a code file. Either a sea-change on how people view work is necessary, or we need to learn to recast all that other work as programming in some way.
Unfortunately, I don't see either of those happening anytime soon.