From a FOSS-user point of view, having a pre-established commercial relationship is good: no-one wants to get approval to spend money on a per-incident basis.

From a FOSS-user point of view, having a pre-established commercial relationship is good: no-one wants to get approval to spend money on a per-incident basis. After that, having a per-hour model to get good-quality support would be good. If there was a place that I could find someone with the right expertise, recommendations, etc. As a maintainer, this would fine too. I'd likely not offer paid support myself -- I have limited time available, and I'd rather be looking after the small queries, and doing the development I want to do rather than doing paid support work, but I'd be really happy for someone else to get paid to do it. I should point out that this has been tried before ... see Cygnus Support, LinuxCare, etc, etc. I don't know of any recent attempts though.