[aaubry]

It's not so simple. The developers are not necessarily available for this kind of support. For example, I maintain an FOSS library, but I already have a full time job, and I'm not interested in working more hours. Unless someone hires me to work full time on this library, there is no chance that I provide paid support. I suspect that many other maintainers are in the same situation.

[dllthomas]

That's also potentially true of proprietary software, though. Not every company will offer a support contract, so if that's what you need you need to pick other software. I agree that probably a smaller fraction of FOSS projects offer first-party support contracts, but on the other hand third-party support contracts are a lot more reasonable in the FOSS context.