Support open source that you use by paying the maintainers to talk to your team
We work like this and it's OK, not perfect but OK<p>For folks in our industry that are not using our software (they are using of the closed-source competitors) we are able to show alternatives and still have conversations with operations folks about methods, ideas and other non-technical methods for businesss-process-automation.<p>We've also got a segment of customers, they are paying us maintainers to basically do the install and a crash-course for the in-house development teams.<p>We've even been able to work with some groups who "just wanted to prototype some ideas around our platform" -- which sounded like custom-development right?  So, naturally we just bill for the time -- like regular old consulting business.  Because our core offering is FOSS we've had a few folks push back "I thought the software was free".  Oh it is...however, our time spent with you at your behest is not.<p>Oddly, I've found some other FOSS projects that I wanted to get some help with -- and led with "I'll pay you to pair-program with me for like four hours and answer my dumb questions" -- I was surprised to be turned down: "we don't want to make this commercial, just file a bug" -- do you want a new bug or do you want $800?<p>Sometimes it's tough to get folk to understand that our FOSS thing needs money to survive and that free-software is not the same as free-consulting.  And another side is that some FOSS folk are actively pushing money away.