Could common open source dependencies be a (con)federal government responsibility? The European Union does not have as large a software industry as the USA so there would be a less strong argument of government/corporate competition. It could take the form of government grants depending on the size. My rationale is that governments benefit from the general prosperity of open source more so than solo authors or small companies.

I am restricting the scope to simple and small libraries where investment is more clearly beneficial unlike Tensorflow as that is large and complex.

Here is an extreme example, the 'either' crate is a 'rayon' dependency and many others. Paradoxically a project of this size likely does not need funding but it is really important.

https://github.com/bluss/either

https://crates.io/crates/either/reverse_dependencies

With applications having so many dependencies, peculiar/'rogue' library changes are guaranteed.