I understand where you are coming from but I imagine few open source projects were created with the idea that they'd eventually make the big bucks on support co

I understand where you are coming from but I imagine few open source projects were created with the idea that they'd eventually make the big bucks on support contracts. I think the important point is that if money should be on the table. After that it's a business negotiation as to how much you are willing to pay. An interesting point is how you can implement a process to make this whole thing not consume non trivial amounts of time. By way of example: Bob is a developer. He finds bug in his code comes from an underlying open source library. This gives Bob 3 options. - Bob can either dig into the library and see if he can fix it and maintain a fork. - Bob can fix it and try to get corporate approval for submitting an upstream patch. - Bob can try to seek approval and budget to pay the maintainer of the project to take a look at the problem. If companies I have worked for are anything to go by 3 sounds like a herculean task. 2 sounds possible but involves effort. 1 is a minor annoyance (with high probability of major issues down the line).