> People _pay_.

From our experience (http://sheetjs.com/, our major open source library is https://github.com/SheetJS/js-xlsx), even with multinational corporations, they move heaven and earth to find another free solution, or spend in-house time to hack together a solution and try to sucker you into helping them, but paying is by and large the last option.

From my experience in the medium business world (maybe 500 people total?), paying is the only option. Open source is evil. Maintaining things is evil. Writing your own code is evil. Just shell out $x,000 for support.

If I could find a way to say "Yeah, we can get 'support' for this open source library for $xxx per month" my life would be much easier.

The Django Rest Framework library has taken this very approach [1] offering both corporate and individual monthly subscriptions which is then used to fund development. It appears to be quite successful in that it's allowed the lead developer to work on the project full time (at a salary of £50k [2]).

[1] https://fund.django-rest-framework.org/topics/funding/

[2] http://www.encode.io/reports/february-2017

This. A lot.

I work at a company with less than 500 people and for IT open source is evil.

I've seen people been told by IT to find another software that does the same thing but paid, and we have a law that mandates us to prefer FLOSS when possible...

You can in many cases.

Not surprising: every development team has some leeway in manpower allocation that can be used for an in-house cludge, but few have much autonomy in financial spending.

As someone working for a huge multinational, the reason for this is that purchasing 'non-standard' software or services is an absolute nightmare. It can take months of back and forth, to and from, getting passed from pillar to post.. eventually you just give up!

I run a small seven figure revenue business and I have paid more than one open source maintainer/contributor for work done. Definitely don't be afraid to ask; but I usually offer upfront. I'm an ex-developer so I usually offer the help I can with the keyboard, but know that it's limited compared to most of the really good developers out there maintaining a real project, so I offer time + money.

The problem is getting single open source maintainers to commit - and followthrough - with support. They are often way too busy with their job to actually be professional with support and adhere to even a loose SLA.

I usually put up a milestone date and direct them to that date, quite a few times have to push that date to work on stuff that pays my bills.

The best ones who pay are those who directly reach out with a paid offer; which shows that they definitely have explored the market (most likely than not) and you are the best option :). The better than the best and great to work with clients are those who just reach out to you directly, only very rarely would happen!!!

Interesting. What are some examples of things consulting companies have added?

Some different perspective. Example Debian with plenty of poorly maintained packets which broke original behavior (say linked against another library which is not recommended by upstream) or disable some features or outdated (not in sense of stable/unstable). Sending DD messages 'please fix, thanks' looks like is very reasonable (although some of them do not think so). Either your maintainer or not - even say one can do it 'better', one can't preempt or overload - it's not just fork the whole distro at github.

Reporting the bug is reasonable. Bugging (no pun intended) them is not.

even say one can do it 'better'

Then offer to take up the maintainer role. Debian has institutions to deal with unresponsive maintainers.

Clearly this is evidence that those institutions are in need of improvement, no? Perhaps too few people know about them, for starters.

Or go with a distribution that makes it trivial to make drive-by contributions, like NixOS for example. Updating a package is a simple as bumping two lines and sending a pull request here: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs

For reference, I’m the (co)maintainer of over 80 packages in Nixpkgs. IIRC, I submitted my first PR within roughly a month of using NixOS. Before NixOS, I had used Ubuntu for 4 years. How many packages did I maintain there? Zero. It’s just too difficult to track down the right project, figure out the arcane build/packaging setup, contact the maintainers, etc.

> chromium

just like several dev over the years implemented privacy conscious options to restric the referer(sic) header just to have google employees silently remove them later on?

well, I guess it can work if the feature you are paying for is not to improve privacy at the expense of google's Ad business.

Do you have a link? I'd figure Google would want to restrict the Referer link, as they were accused in the move to HTTPS (which did break it for a lot of sites linked from Search).

you will have to search. its hidden in unrelated commits. but features that were removed at different points in time are: no referrer/only first party referrer in settings. no referrer in their about:config equivalent at the time (its a moving target). command line option to disable referrer.

all added and vanished at random points in time.