Totally agree on the goal, it would be great if companies established slush funds for their OSS support. That said, it’s not anyone’s responsibility to provide

Totally agree on the goal, it would be great if companies established slush funds for their OSS support. That said, it’s not anyone’s responsibility to provide an OSS dev with fulfilling work but themselves. If they don’t want to ask for money, chances are they won’t get any. And it’s not really relevant what money is or is not a pittance for a company, they don’t generally decide their expenditures based on having spare cash, they buy what they need and try to keep what they need to a minimum. As an engineer, if I ask for a $20K budget for OSS support, chances are I will be flatly denied. The good news is many companies already do support the OSS they depend on in multiple ways. The largest tech companies are spending a great deal more than $20k on various kinds of OSS support, FAANG companies spend millions on it. The terms of the economic exchange of any software is the author’s to set. It they want money for their work, in the majority of cases they will need to ask for it, it’s not going to be handed to them, especially when the software is given away for free in the first place. By giving the software away, the author is setting the terms of the economic exchange. Expecting the terms to change later without asking is just as bad as anyone expecting free support. I think if we want to meaningfully support open source, we should figure out how to pay for the software in the first place to use it, not expect companies to throw a dollar in after the fact or only if they ask for changes. Making change requests does not align with the value of open source for most companies. The primary value is in it’s existence.