A thought I see repeated often is that Futuremark's problems stem from its flawed business model, ie. that they take money from hardware manufacturers. I think this misses the point.
Futuremark is dependent on IHVs because they need specifications, developer support and prerelease hardware to realise any of their benchmark. Without these things their benchmark applications just don't come to exist. Accepting money from the IHVs is irrelevant with respect to that or the recent events surrounding 3DMark03. Imagine that Nvidia had never paid a penny to Futuremark. They still could have left the beta program, started the calculated (and very successful) discrediting campaign and marginalised 3DMark03 with continuing cheat drivers, weakening its usefulness as a measurement program. Accepting or not accepting money from IHVs would have made no difference.
It obvious that FM viewed having Nvidia back in their beta program as a "top priority" because of the development of The Next Thing, not because they had huge dollar signs glowing in their eyes. Again, money or no money, they need Nvidia to give them their next gen specs, hardware and developer support during potential difficulties in the development that is happening right now in order to make a good and relevant benchmarking program.
The "capitulation" of Futuremark during the C-word incident had nothing to do with "being financially dependent" on Nvidia. It simply had to do with the staggering costs of a potential lawsuit, the excessive strain that all this holabaloo put on a 30-person company and the way Nvidia's continued lack of cooperation would have impacted the development The Next Thing. Again, money from Nvidia, I dare say, is not a significant factor in itself.
I would be happy to see a situation where the development of the benchmark is paid by Microsoft, OEMs, reviewers and individual end users but I think you can see that it would have made no difference with respect to the past events and it wouldn't change the fact that Futuremark will always be dependent on the IHVs. It is not really a solution.
The solution is that Microsoft will take more interest in seeing what is being done with its API and within the drivers they certify and that OEMs will start to use more influence (not necessarily publicly, but behind the scenes) in order to make IHVs behave better.
