Comment by JimDabell

> Wake me up when governments actually start writing checks.

This is already happening. The European Commission funds thousands of open-source projects:

https://ngi.eu/about/

For instance, Stalwart is an open-source, Rust-based mail server and collaboration suite that has received grants from the EC:

https://stalw.art/blog/nlnet-grant-stalwart/

https://stalw.art/blog/nlnet-grant-collaboration/