[ricardobeat]

What if the company makes contributions to open-source through other projects - for which no one is paying them? Is it ‘fair’? Who is the leech?

Even a $1m/y company (which is not big at all) will be hard pressed to pay 1k/year for a git wrapper. The whole idea of OSS is that everyone benefits from the exchange and costs are distributed. This won’t scale at all - count your current open source dependencies and imagine paying that sum for each of them.

[alien_]

If they do have a problem paying $90 or even $1000 for a piece of software they really need, they are free to ask one of their developers to write one in house from scratch and see how much this sunken time would cost them.

The sad reality is that costs are not distributed, most companies just grab whatever open source software they can and only contribute the least they can get away with, most of the times nothing at all.

Many projects survive just because of dedicated individual developers and maintainers spending their limited spare time, who end up being burned out.

In an ideal world open source software that brings significant value for companies should be considered as part of their stack, they should either hire or assign someone for supporting it, or pay the existing maintainers, and ideally this should be somewhat proportional to the value they get out of it.

Unfortunately donations as method of payment rarely work(usually end up being paid by individual employees from their own pocket), so the only option to get money from the company itself is to somehow get it charged.

They usually have no problem with being charged money, as long as the price is reasonable for the value it brings and less than would cost to write the same code in-house or to even have a meeting about acquiring it. It also should be significant, they wouldn't go through the bureaucratic procedures for a 10€ one off payment.

Developers don't expect to become rich out of this, they often would settle for less than their full time job, as long as they can work full time on the project they care about and still make a living. But because so few companies share the costs, they tend to be significant for those who do pay, so the prices will be higher at first but should decrease quickly as more companies share the burden.