Under an ideal economy and politics, we might use taxation to fund OpenSource projects that are in the public interest : just as we used tax to build road, rail, bridges, and other widely used shared infrastructure.

It would not be the end of competition or capitalism if we did this - similarly we should fund science and engineering research, and that could include funding development of OSS projects indirectly.

I know YC say they invest in business models built around open source, and open source can work as a marketing sales funnel toward paid SaaS premium features. It would be nice to have some analytics on what hybrid OSS/SaaS biz models work well in practice.