In my experience a lot of firms don't necessarily want direct support - but they may want an SLA. The nature of the open source market has changed, and I've fo

In my experience a lot of firms don't necessarily want direct support - but they may want an SLA. The nature of the open source market has changed, and I've found that most people conflate free as in speech with free as in beer. As a result, people are picking up open source projects specifically because there's no cost involved, making support - or any kind of license or subscription - a very tough sell. The only predictable way of selling services on top of an open project I've found has been to hold a piece back and make it commercial, which I think cuts against the principle of the thing. Nonetheless, eating and paying rent are important, so that's the way it goes. One-off customizations are another matter, but the expectation is that because you gave away your code to begin with, you're going to work for a below-market hourly rate. Disclosure: I've cofounded two end-user open source projects (elgg.org and withknown.com). At this point I could not be more jaded. It's possible the dynamics are different for infrastructure projects, but the state of OpenSSL et al suggest not.