I think the sponsorship/bounty model is excellent. Instead of making one of your employees spend several months modifying a program or migrating to a different

I think the sponsorship/bounty model is excellent. Instead of making one of your employees spend several months modifying a program or migrating to a different solution, offer to pay money ($5k? $10k?) for a solution to your particular problem. LuaJIT used this for many of its ports to different architectures, where a company would pay $20k or so to sponsor work to make it run on their platform. Cloudflare sponsored string-specific optimizations for their WAF.