this is a YC-fundable startup. Here are the projects I can think of:
1. Celery - jeez. It runs half the world's high availability python software, yet has severe funding crunch.
2. Octave - obviously
3. Jupyter+Pandas - http://jupyter.org/
4. Vue.js - http://vuejs.org/support-vuejs/
People already pay big bucks to learn how to code, use that to fund the senior devs, the junior devs gain the experience they need to change their career trajectory.
This guy should not have been the director and doing the majority of the legwork for 25 years! He needs to be put in a position to get an awesome job at either classic big tech corporate, then some high prestige research unit. And there should be an understudy in the queue set to take over the work, and eventually earn his reward in the afterlife.
I mean, it's only OpenSSL which was for a long time the foundation of much of the online economy.
Or the various BSD's.
Perhaps the model needs support / services included.
Edit: or perhaps humble bundle is just more oriented to consumer goods.
Presumably we're past the point where anything with a .com in the name gets showered in VC money.