> Ideally, every developer in every large co would be given some budget to spread sponsorship money around as they saw fit If I'm not mistaken, there is a ton

> Ideally, every developer in every large co would be given some budget to spread sponsorship money around as they saw fit If I'm not mistaken, there is a ton of overhead ensuring that the money doesn't directly benefit any of the employees themselves. There are all sorts of regulations around how things like gifts and donations are accounted for, taxed and so forth. Then, you also wade into territory of graft, bribes and so on (employees of company A funneling money into open source project B, which is worked on by employees of potential customer C).