I’ll keep to poll open until the thread closes, but it seems that there is some interest, but (as I suspected) probably not enough to even pay a single person half-time.
I feel slightly demotivated to contribute to Elm, pureley out of love for it, knowing that a business that doesn’t give freely back to me is consuming it for profit
That’s not necessarily how that would work. I think a company set up like this would generally work as open-source and potentially (if the core elm team wanted) could even send PRs to the core repos. The thing one would pay for isn’t exclusive fixes, but the knowledge that someone has your back if a show-stopping bug appears in the core library as well as easy tooling to apply those (and I suspect making that tooling seamless would be a big bulk of the work, especially as few people use the elm compiler just on its own, but rather through integrations with Webpack et al).
Such a business would inevitably act in its own interests, whilst wielding influence over something that matters to me.
Not clear to me that anyone has much influence around here outside the core Elm team. If this hypothetical company became so indispensable that it would start getting influential despite that, I think that would be a very strong signal (and note that Evan and company seem to be very interested and sensitive on the topic of corporate influence on open source) that the current maintenance model may need to be reconsidered. Conversely, if such a company went quickly out of business (or languished in obscurity), it would provide validation to the hypothesis that things are fine as they are.
I don’t think you will make money anyway
Well I wasn’t planning to be the one to run this, but I agree that it doesn’t seem to be an amazing business plan as things stand.