I think we agree on almost everything we have said. Open Source projects can generate money. People should be paid for the work that they do (or inversely sensible people do work which will get them paid). People are free to spend their money how they wish.
Would you have been as happy to pay if the changes were merged into master as soon as they were deemed an improvement and reliable? I suspect most reasonable people would be, or maybe even more motivated to contribute.
And only a limited few see the benefits of it with this setup. This is really my only concern with what he is doing.
I don’t see any problem with freelancers finding funding to work on OSS. I feel like we as an industry do need to support this with our attitude, wallets and technology if we want it to succeed. I would love to do it one day. I feel we should be advocating for benefit for the masses rather than segregating people into those with the ability to pay (and therefore get better software) and those who can’t. That’s a recipe for spreading effort out needlessly.
Imagine Nvidia hires a dev to work on Blender for a year, but only releases their version of blender internally and under the table to other organisations. Now, this is unlikely, but you can see that it would indeed get Nvidia access to the software they paid for, and the developer would indeed get paid, but the community at large would not benefit at all. Luckily this isn’t happening yet (even with studios which are developing Blender for internal use) since developers and studios also are contributing their efforts back into the community.