Or even replying that they are busy with other things but if the company wants to pay for the change they can work on it, and company replying that that seems like "extortion", as if the developer is under moral obligation to fix Initrode's problems for free by the end of the week.
One clueless employee, almost certainly without the knowledge of his cow-orkers or managers let alone any kind of authorization to represent their employer when communicating externally, writes a dumb email to a FOSS project and suddenly the tech commentariat is all abuzz about "$BIGCORP (the whole thing) is 'practically crying and begging' to $FOSS_PROJECT for a feature"? Surely there must be a name for this fallacy and, if not, there should be. The organizational hivemind fallacy perhaps?
One reason beside bad culture is another aspect of bad culture. If they want a fix to a piece of FOSS, probably a library, they might have to beg their management for weeks or months, instead of just specifying that their project requires lib-from-overworked-dev-in-Nebraska-who-is-thinking-of-taking-up-alpaca-ranching-instead version 2.44 or later, which is what they can get if they beg, cry, and/or bully said alpaca contemplating developer.
I've been slow walking my FOSS releases because I have no idea how to squeeze some ramen out of it. Though my (dare I suggest) paradigm/category busting project was really hard (for me) to figure out, the end result is simplicity itself. And so therefore trivial to clone, fork, run away.
Possessing the business acumen of plankton, I've been swindled, plagiarized, and mooted a few times before. I don't need much more than ramen money. But not getting anything while others profit from my work, again, would really suck.
The project started as nonprofit with both a business goal (sustain itself by selling online courses) and a philanthropic vision (essentially: increase education access by disrupting the degree market & also open sourcing the code).
A decade later, the nonprofit sold the entire online course business, its brand, and most of its staffing to a for-profit company. It kept the copyright to the open source code, and the remaining staff now use the proceeds of the deal as an endowment to pusue the original philanthropic mission, which includes being a sort of core team for that open source code.
Some details [0]. The online course business is edx.org, the buyer was 2U, the source code is Open edX [1] and the nonprofit started as edX Inc and was renamed to Axim [2] after the sale.
0. https://press.edx.org/2u-inc.-and-edx-complete-industry-rede...
TL;DR: Start off as a nonprofit, build a valuable product, sell the product, and then use the money to continue the nonprofit. YMMV ;)
Fortunately, our project is moving in the opposite direction than the one that the article describes: we have an independent steering committee & well-funded core team now, and lately have been actively trying to boot proprietary features out of the core offering. But it's a lot of work, both technically and socially, and we'd have much more time to spend on new features if it weren't for the dead weight we have to deal with.