The practical fixes that keep being proposed treat [open-source] as a market anyway and bolt the missing pieces on, which is where bug bounties, sponsorship marketplaces, dependents-weighted funding formulas, criticality scores, and tokenised reward schemes all come from. Every one of them is an attempt to reconstruct a price for something that has never had one, and to do that they need a number to stand in for value.

Open-source is odd from an economics perspective. When hobbies intersect with the wider world - there are other examples like this in the volunteer space, but none so big, I guess.