Isn’t what you’re describing just the business model of open core companies like Confluent, or MySQL -> MariaDB? The intermediaries tend to grow large for successful open source projects, because there’s a lot of money to be made, but it’s not uncommon in my experience for the core maintainers of a project to go found a company around it. If it’s just an awareness thing, by all means, let’s make sure open source maintainers know this is an option available to them.