> It’s sensible to buy a support contract. It’s charitable and good PR to give them money.
If the development of an open-source project significantly affects your commercial product, there is nothing charitable in supporting it: because you are the one who needs that project to survive.
Not really, it's open source. You could just start putting resources into it yourself. If you back up to a local copy, it's not like that source code is just going to disappear.
Because that's a sensible thing to do when someone's open source project is at the very core of your commercial product?
> When was the last time someone you know paid Redhat for CentOS or Canonical for Ubuntu on principal?
Netflix and Tarsnap have donated to FreeBSD Foundation multiple times[1], and Jan Koum has donated over $1 million after selling WhatsApp[2].
Also, look at how many companies are sponsoring LetsEncrypt[3] – including Akamai and Fastly – but not Cloudflare.
[1] https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donors/
[2] https://www.freebsdnews.com/2016/12/02/jan-koum-founder-what...
[3] https://letsencrypt.org/sponsors/