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!