The hope is that social pressure will encourage more and more companies to participate.

Oof. Yeah, nah... Capitalism doesn't work that way, and if by some miracle it did, the rug would get pulled sooner than later. Most businesses don't even pay their employees fairly, and you expect an optional expense to be sustainable?

Paying for software or software support is a genuine hurdle:

1. Ads
2. Sell user data
3. Subscription fee
4. Donations

Article ultimately focuses on 4 wanting to make it a social norm. I think this is wishful thinking. Businesses need hard legal or financial incentives to do anything. Adding a (stronger) tax break could work, but now you've added complexity to the tax code which means more loopholes. Suddenly paying for android is "teeeechnically" open source and you get abuse.

Seems like this is a solvable problem though.

The problem is card fees... But yes, I have on my mind to donate to romv1 for the incredible genius of scrcpy, as well as VideoLAN for VLC.

I like elementaryos approach to encourage people to pay the dev

I recall donationware being claimed to only provide a trickle amount - usually due to people being greedy and wanting to keep as much money as possible. Perhaps that was just that one person, but it's still unreliable income source for the Dos shareware era.

Asking for donations doesn't even solve the symptom of important software needing a team to scrounge funding. No publicly-important infrastructure should require begging.