Professional maintainers: a wake-up call
> Now is the perfect time for Open Source maintainers to become legible to the big companies that depend on them—and that want to get more out of them—and send them five-to-six figure invoices.<p>Well, this is exactly what I've been doing around VideoLAN (VLC, x264) and FFmpeg for the last few years. In order to do that, I've created 2 official companies Videolabs and FFlabs (besides the non-profit orgs) and I've gone through all the hoops to get paid (PO, billing, invoices, registering to large companies is a lot of paperwork, tbh, but well..) and we try and bill small to large companies that depends on those projects.<p>And FFmpeg and x264 are the core of the online video.<p>So I did exactly what Filippo is saying we should do.<p>But the result is really not impressive. Seriously, asking for money for support from those companies feels like we're pulling the nails, even if their full business depends on it. Getting 30-50k$ from those companies for support for one year can be very challenging, long or leading to nowhere at all.<p>So, large SV companies and startup should also start agreeing to pay for open source, when it's the core of the tech.