If they don’t even know enough about open source (and are resistent to being enlightened), they shouldn’t be making this decision.

Devil’s Advocate - it’s not their job to educate themselves about the vagrancies of open source, it’s the developer’s (or more accurately tech lead’s) job to educate them about the particulars of a project, to prove that the project is healthy with good support today and will be healthy with good support tomorrow.

Without those assurances, and without investigating the project myself, I’d probably turn it down too.

Are they that wrong? What real support does an npm module have?

What support do you get by buying a non-open source module?

A support contract, typically. Few people sell code alone. They sell code plus a contract to support that code.

Support contracts can be very lucrative.

It's usually included when you purchase a commercial license.

I work with a company that generally stays away from open source software, unless they have an in-house developer that can maintain it.

Most open source projects (unless it's backed by a huge company that also charges for support) are run by volunteers that have a day job. This means that support will be non-existent beyond what the developer(s) feel like and bug fixes/updates may or may not happen. This doesn't work that well when a company relies on this software for any critical task.

Exactly. Given the absolute shitshow maintaining anything in the JavaScript ecosystem I can't blame them.