I think the basic problem here is a lot of technology is heavily hyped and in use but 'not in use'. People are learning about them, trying them, even trying or

I think the basic problem here is a lot of technology is heavily hyped and in use but 'not in use'. People are learning about them, trying them, even trying or using them in small internal deployments but are not buying them or supporting them in any way. Those who take them into production are startups who are themselves trying to succeed or large companies who have tons of engineering talent who can create the product if need be but since its open source and available they use the open source version but they don't value it. Think the recent article where Github, forget supporting Redis has not even reached out to the developer once to thank him. The demands of the community are high touch, even one or two weeks without commits and people start getting restive and raise 'alarms' on github and here. If there is potential value that you are still figuring out how to capture and a lot of attention you could end up expending time dealing with the politics of a fork. On the other end purchase decisions of most companies brings a whole new sets of requirements from internal processes, approvals, policies to decision makers and most open source companies do not have the resources or experience initially to manage the expensive and high touch sales and marketing process that most companies buying technology require. If you have funding the pressure is even higher. There is a missing piece of how to translate support and usage of open source software for commerical reasons into some sort of revenue even minimal without friction. I think there should be a spotlight on companies using open source and their support and contribution back, and not just acquiring projects or hiring their developers which is an 'influence play'.