[johngossman]

In my prior career I talked to many companies about open source usage. If you tell them they are running an unsupported database or operating system in production, they will often see the value of buying support. But it is much harder to get them to pay for non-production stuff, especially development tools. And even if you find an enlightened manager, getting budget to pay a maintainer for a project is very difficult to even explain.

“We’re paying for contract development? But it’s not one of our products and we’ll have no rights to the software? They’ll fix all the bugs we find, right? Right?” This a hard conversation at most companies, even tech companies.

[ghaff]

Development tools was almost always a tough standalone business even before open source became so prevalent.

[akoboldfrying]

"They’ll fix all the bugs we find, right?" -- that sounds to me like a reasonable requirement on the maintainer, if they are going to be paid a non negligible amount.