The value of distribution profiles

This (somewhat old) post from Zacker does a great job summing up a catch-22 that comes along with an open source community like Drupal (allow me to excerpt):

• most of the value created by the Drupal community that vendors and consultants rely on to sell as services to customers come from unpaid core contributions
• many of the seasoned Drupal core hackers are getting job offers left and right to come and do Drupal consulting full time.
• This is creating a scenario in which while many more people are paying their bills through Drupal hacking and more and more business are built around business value created by the Drupal community, it is not getting any easier to make sure the heavy lifting on core work is getting done.

What can we do now to make sure that some of the money coming into the community over the next year is put back in to supporting the core work that we as a community are relying on?

My feeling is that distribution profiles will be a key factor in keeping the ecosystem between commerce and community both healthy and thriving.

A well built, well maintained distribution, will have a wide range of business value...

A Drupal developer, consultant, or organization can sell downloadable or hosted solutions, provide value added services on top (custom theming and design; programming and development; consulting, training, and education), or use it as an outlet for content they produce and/or aggregate.

A huge range of individuals and organizations, outside of Drupal, can use these plug and play solutions as a foundation in which to build or grow their own business. End users and consumers, of course, will not only derive value, but dictate the types of distributions that these business' will provide.

So will there be a market for Drupal distributions? Just look at all the successful business', media outlets, educational institutions, musicians, and blogging networks, that are using or providing services on WordPress. We should be able to provide a more powerful, flexible, out of the box solution, specific to all these needs. Ideally we'll do better than these.

All of this circles back to the Drupal community. Most of the ingredients (contributed modules, themes, Drupal core, etc.) that make up a distribution are borne out of volunteer contributions from the community. As the distributions adapt and evolve to meet the business and market needs, even more will be asked of the community. This could be - Increased emphasis of relationships/interactivity between nodes, modules or 3rd party APIs. Better support for open standards such as microformats. New modules, themes, and designs. More documentation, tutorials, install profile recipes and other how-tos. Continued support of core projects and development. All this, in turn, along with the distributions themselves, will benefit/be open to the entire community.

There's been positive steps and suggestions pertaining to providing incentives to the community. I'm wondering if some the same reasoning could work for distributions. Could/should distributions be funded? Would companies wanting to use or sell a particular distribution, be willing to sponsor development? Would consumers and end users be willing to donate or even pre-pay for solutions they can use out of the box?

While some of the value, derived from distributions, could/should be allocated to support the communities core work and ongoing development, we need to create the solutions first. Having said that, I think there are a lot of options.

I could be way off in my thinking, but hopefully there are some talking points for a continued discussion...