Has anyone contacted Mark Shuttleworth for OpenSSH funding? I think there is a very high probability that he would be happy to help OpenSSH, maybe even pay someone fulltime to work on it...
(I remember from the beginning of 2004 that Shuttleworth was paying some bugzilla developer such as to quit AOL and work on bugzilla... Heck, now Shuttleworth pays for the whole linux distribution!) And after we'll have one distribution supporting the OpenSSH team, others will have a good example to follow.