[metalmanac]

I think it would be better to focus on getting businesses who use open source software to pay the authors of the software. Businesses have money, most users of open source software don't have enough money to pay for (F)OSS donations or support.

The other issue with the model of paying for support is that it's just not scalable for the authors. What do the authors do if a big corp asks for support regarding something that only happens at scale? It's a huge time sink for the authors.

Here's my suggestion :

1) Get businesses to support authors of the software they use, by paying.

2) Get businesses to contribute to the development of the software. Eg- Have employees work on the code base.

I haven't thought about this enough, but a marketplace which lists software projects and their contributors, and companies can support projects of their choosing by paying monthly or annually. Individual users should also be able to contribute if they want to.

[askvictor]

Oss maintainers also need to provide 'commercial' licences that are no different to the normal license, except they come with an invoice. Some companies are happy to pay for free software as long as there is an invoice to keep the accounting people happy. A donation model doesn't work here.

[cperciva]

What do the authors do if a big corp asks for support regarding something that only happens at scale?

I don't see the problem here. Presumably a big corp could afford to pay enough for support that a developer would be inclined to help even if said big corp was the only user encountering a particular problem.

[watwut]

It is more likely that big corp will have their own team fix the problem, unless the original code is too big or convoluted.

[pjmlp]

The majority of big corp outside IT world just use consulting.

If they happen to have an internal team, it is mostly to manage contractors and architecture decisions for what they want to get delivered to them.

[watwut]

I would count consultant as "own team" in this scenario. Someone company controls at that time, knows company code/cases and is available more or less instantly. A lot depends on how much special knowledge is needed to understand open source project codebase etc. Ordering contractors you already know around is easier then ordering someone on other side of the world who has different employer and priorities.

[EvgeniyZh]

Actually big businesses pay to people to develop FOSS