Companies will often pay small amounts for needed support. It’s pretty common to just hire an external contractor to make some improvements to an open source pr

Companies will often pay small amounts for needed support. It’s pretty common to just hire an external contractor to make some improvements to an open source project that you need. I know a number of people who have gotten open source work funded in this way. What companies are reluctant to do is pay people money for nothing in return. There are just too many different open source libraries that you use in the normal course of development to communicate with all the developers, much less pay them.