[bjornsteffanson]

Exactly this. Every OSS project is going to have a slightly different arrangement, but many contributions to OSS projects are subject to conflict of interest agreements. I work full-time on a large OSS project that has thousands of community contributors, and also has a few hundred paid full-time contributors as well. Our COI agreement limits what we can accept as gifts and outside payments. I would be open to speaking of course -- in fact, it's our responsibility to the community as core contributors. But taking a paid Zoom call with a commercial entity is very different than speaking at a conference or responding to Github issues (at my company, at least).

I'm genuinely not certain how someone would approach my company to do this, which is also exactly to the author's first point quoted in the parent comment. My guess is likely that someone would pay my company, and my company would compensate me to speak as a normal part of my day-to-day role.