I just wanted to put out there that companies often don't have a mechanism for funding external open source projects. I spent the last year working on an internal "open source" project at a company that's traditionally not thought of as being technical. This after hours project gained a lot of traction and is now pretty heavily used requiring quite a bit of maintenance. Unfortunately, because it started as a grass roots project with no funding, nobody can decide which Line-of-Business should be responsible for funding this project. The company promotes itself as a technology company and encourages employees to contribute to and release open source software and tools. Despite this attitude the stakeholders who make the funding decisions are typically not the direct consumers of OSS so we still have to make the case for sponsorship ourselves.
On a side note, I think companies would be willing to pay for contributors of high profile open source projects to come in to speak about project hurdles and your experiences in general. To a lot of non-OSS developers, an OSS contributor seems more like a benevolent mage rather than a piper.
Hello,
I just wanted to put out there that companies often don't have a mechanism for funding external open source projects. I spent the last year working on an internal "open source" project at a company that's traditionally not thought of as being technical. This after hours project gained a lot of traction and is now pretty heavily used requiring quite a bit of maintenance. Unfortunately, because it started as a grass roots project with no funding, nobody can decide which Line-of-Business should be responsible for funding this project. The company promotes itself as a technology company and encourages employees to contribute to and release open source software and tools. Despite this attitude the stakeholders who make the funding decisions are typically not the direct consumers of OSS so we still have to make the case for sponsorship ourselves.
On a side note, I think companies would be willing to pay for contributors of high profile open source projects to come in to speak about project hurdles and your experiences in general. To a lot of non-OSS developers, an OSS contributor seems more like a benevolent mage rather than a piper.