Kickstarters like the one you linked don't suffer from the tragedy of the commons because people are essentially just pre-paying for a product. With funding an open source ML model, there's little incentive to not be a free-rider.

I doubt there would be much funding for a kickstarter that didn't promise to be open source.

> people are essentially just pre-paying for a product

I think this is what the 4 nines of the user space wants. A pre trained, open source, model to work with.