There are instances of EU funding open computing initiatives, for example KDE’s desktop semantic search. Patrick have you considered applying for grant programs?
Provided that the money is neutral and has no strings attached, it would be great for you.
More links:
look for the section EU funding for research & innovation
There are ~30 or so or more potential sponsors that one could ask.
Going through their hoops (reading up all their stuff, writing proposals, communication) apparently is a huge task. Copy and paste won’t work. If I was to go through all of them, I couldn’t to much development for a half year or so.
One could make oneself a full time paid position for working on that stuff:
There are 3 active discussions with sponsors at the moment. Nothing definitive yet. May or may very well not succeed. Mostly they find Whonix too unusable due to its two VM design.
Without funding it’s hard to find high skilled developers who could do the difficult stuff such as VirtualBox GUI replacements [or whatever a great dev could do to improve usability] and such. Very few applied:
And without the potential manpower it’s difficult to find a sponsor. A bootstrap issue.