Thanks for the link, that Futurice policy is really cool.

I certainly felt comfortable working on decaffeinate a little bit during work hours, and my company was fine with it, but I think the amount of time it needed was more than a small startup should be willing to invest. I would have pushed back if someone wanted me to work on it full time until it was done, and I wouldn't have worked on it if it was only an internal tool. Agreed that having a more formalized company position on open source work would be nice. For now it's just "use good judgement".

I think in an ideal world, there would be lots of companies that each explicitly invest a little bit into these types of projects. It's already happening to some extent, but I think the incentives are hard to get right (especially for projects with a high chance of failure), and plenty of popular projects probably don't get enough attention, especially from companies that rely on them.