I think a lot of those people are probably in the "I would do it, but I have enough / too much work already" or "I have other stuff to do in my life" category.

For some its hard because they want to help somehow but don't understand the structure. If you can get to the point of creating a patch in the right format someone needs to accept the pull request. The barrier is too high for most so most work on there own stuff and publish to github.

There needs to be community pressure on companies to allocate resources and time for employees to contribute back to whatever projects they use.

It's not unreasonable for someone to have hobbies other than coding outside of work. Many people that contribute to open source end up doing so during their free time, but I'd guess that a fair share of those 44% of developers have different priorities.

> There needs to be community pressure on companies to allocate resources and time for employees to contribute back to whatever projects they use.

Companies don't allocate resources and time to employees without expecting a return on investment. Any contributions made on company time would have to managed by the company with the intent that they serve its needs first and foremost, or else be considered theft of company resources and time.

It sounds like a good idea but I can't see it turning into anything but an opportunity for companies to leverage control over open source projects.

What's the definition for contributing to open source code here? Is it publishing code (ie pushing to a public repo on GitHub), putting in the effort to maintain/market it, identifying reproducible issues in other open source projects, submitting patches/features to existing open source?

Most places I've worked at had policies against contributing to open source projects.

Was about to say the same. My company explicitly forbids it for some stupid reason. One of the main drivers for my current job search.