There is funding for blender development, right? I mean, there are people getting paid for all the things they do for blender, yes? So how is it funded?
probably donations, possibly by a few companies. But who says anyone gets paid for working on blender, I was under the impression that they were volunteers
Except for the few (4 I believe) coders (Brecht for example) that are employed by the Blender Foundation, it is developed freely by people who volunteer their time and skill. Amazing, isn’t it!
search for Blender Foundation in this page…
http://code.google.com/soc/2008
one more reason i love google 
I was thinking, maybe we could bolster funding and improve the blender project by collaborating on a commercial game project. Sort of like a tribute to blender. What do you think?
Or, maybe we could all just donate!
A commercial game project for blender is just plain stupid, games today need much more than blender can provide. Even if you did rewrite the game engine and everything it would be sub-par compared to everything else. The average consumer would not buy it. Since blender is not really designed for games, it is more animation software, I would advise movie projects… However rendering them would be an issue. But I’m sure many members of the community would be willing to offer their computers to render some of it. Movies like Big Buck Bunny bring in a profit I’m sure, but these are just shorts, many people would be reluctant to purchase a short animation at pretty much the same price of a feature film. I don’t really believe you could get a blender film into the movie theaters either, I don’t know too much about that however. I don’t really think it’s possible to do much more than the shorts for a project and such, unless you convince a larger company like pixar to use blender it would do much more than a commercial game project (like that’s going to happen though). If we were able to get a larger company to use blender to develope a movie, or game it would work much better. Because not only would they be able to sell it better, they would also have a large team that could modify blender. Meh, as I see it’s just not going to happen