I suspect that the reason that 3.00 final hasn't been released is more to do with the boys in blue being far too busy with real work and less to do with lack of monetary resources.

One possibility might be to permit certain 3rd parties (say, mlord and tfabris) access to internal version control and bug tracking systems under NDA agreements. This would allow them to report on, update and close bug reports, checkout, edit, commit code and finally tag the repository ready for a release.

This model is used by a number of the big ICT players including Nokia, Motorola and Sun Microsystems. Of course, mlord and tfabris might not be interested in playing release manager or sustaining engineer, even if the community paid them .