No Free Features
I’m fully in agreement with the goal here, that for-profit companies should pay for changes they request. And some companies do pay OSS projects for support. SQLite is one high profile example (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sqlite.org&#x2F;consortium.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sqlite.org&#x2F;consortium.html</a>), and there are others with varying degrees of success.<p>The problem I see here is that there is no clear or easy path to making this goal a reality everywhere. What really happens most of the time is engineers at various companies are downloading and integrating open source code <i>because</i> it’s free to use as-is. These engineers aren’t managers and do not typically have the ability to spend company money on software without approvals from management, and while they should ask, the reality is that they don’t ask.<p>If I’m an engineer inside a for-profit company, with no explicit software budget, what steps should I take to prepare the company for offering bounties? Should something be happening <i>before</i> we download and integrate a new OSS project that sets a management&#x2F;company expectation of paying for future changes, and what should that look like?