> if companies like Apple really wanted to fund this work, I'm pretty sure they could figure something out.

Having spent the last ~6 years in big tech consistently frustrated by the rigidity of the processes and finding clever ways to navigate (see: wade through the bullshit), this isn’t as easy as you’d hope. The problem is that someone has to spend a non-trivial amount of time advocating internally for something like this (a “non-standard process”) which generally means asking pinging random people across finance, procurement, and legal how to deal with it and 99% of people will just throw up their hands (especially in this case because they don’t understand the importance of it). If things don’t fit a mold in these big companies, they fall into the event horizon and are stretched out to infinity.

Couldn’t you just go up your chain to the VP or whatever and use their backing / negotiating at the VP level to organize? It might not work for random projects but if Apple is using libsodium for security this could presumably be pitched as an investment into their own software supply chain.

Bless, 7 years of this at Google razed my soul (to a point)