It's not quite that simple because you are spending "other people's money". Say I own a small business. I can make a donation to anything i like because the o

It's not quite that simple because you are spending "other people's money". Say I own a small business. I can make a donation to anything i like because the only person who might complain is me. Ultimately I am donating my own money. If I work at a large company, all the money belongs to other people. Naturally I need to spend money to get stuff done, I'm given a budget and some rules framework. To avoid corruption, theft and embezzlement, that set of rules has balances. People who audit my spending etc. Imagine they set a rule saying I can spend $100k on "random open source". Cool, my wife makes an Open Source flappy birds clone. 100k to her. Not cool, it must be something we use. Cool. My wife has forked a text editor (say emacs), made a couple spelling changes, and I've mandated that as our one-true-editor. 100k to her. You get the picture. Donations are indistinguishable from corruption. As a company what I want is for you to -sell- me something I can justify. Not just "the same thing under a different license" which spawns the "why aren't we using the free one" conversation, but some feature or benefit I can point to. We're spending 100k, but we got the following economic benefit from that. So to answer your question. Companies can't "give", they can only "buy". (For any significant amount.) If you want corporate money, have a product to sell, and a proper process (invoicing etc) to process sales.