Comparing paying a FLOSS developer to paying for commercial software doesn't make sense. Companies don't see themselves as funding development either way.
And yet they still want them, and things take non-zero time to implement regardless of who is doing it. It's not as if proprietary software appears from whole cloth in zero time containing every feature requested by every customer.
> If they have work to do, they need a solution NOW.
If they have work to do they can do it the same way they did it last week. But when the question comes whether to upgrade to the new version of the proprietary software, you should ask whether it makes more sense to pay the money to do that this year, or stay on the existing version for a year while you use the money that you would have spent and instead get the free software equivalent into a state that it satisfies your needs, then never have to pay for the proprietary software again.
> Then once the purchase has been made, the question of paying someone to work on it is a separate issue. Most rational people would say "why would I do that?"
Because you have twenty or more full-time people using it and if you can make them each even a single digit percentage more efficient on a permanent basis, it becomes highly profitable to hire the software developer that allows that to happen.
> Comparing paying a FLOSS developer to paying for commercial software doesn't make sense. Companies don't see themselves as funding development either way.
What did they think the proprietary software license money was funding?
What causes most usage of big proprietary software is that the software has 10,000 features and every customer only needs five of them, but for each customer it's a different five. That makes it hard for a free competitor to get users because adding five features only gets one customer; it scales poorly without revenue.
But as the customer yourself, having your developer add the five things you yourself need is completely feasible, and doesn't help your competitors that much because the five things they need are different.