It is possible to look at this from a different perspective. Paying a grant to a couple of developers may be a nice thing to do, but you still don't get a contract with any guarantees.
Paying a shitton of money to established company like Red Hat, on another hand, gives you a contract with liabilities and all other stuff that you'll be able to lean on - and cover your ass with, if need arises.
> Paying a grant to a couple of developers may be a nice thing to do, but you still don't get a contract with any guarantees.
We started polyglot.network for exactly this reason. It's an external development agency that works on the FOSS features/bugfixes that you care about. By having multiple customers, it can distribute the costs (which would not be possible if you tried doing the same work in-house).
So, you essentially pay 1/3rd for a developer seat but get 2/3rd of a developer's output. The buffer exists because open-source projects have some inherent risks. You might want a library/framework to implement a feature, but the upstream may not be willing to merge their PR: Either to protect their commercial interests, or philosophical differences.
We've been working with a few companies and have started contributing to a few Clojure, Python projects already. We work with a community of developers working remotely, and hence, have talent available at almost all languages/frameworks (hence, "polyglot.network").
Fair enough, but we floated the idea of support contracts (with a large company, not a tip or grant to a couple of developers) and still didn't get much interest. As far as I can tell companies are not offering contracts or asking for guarantees either.
There are clearly exceptions. Red Hat is obviously one, as are many successful OSS companies. But a lot of those companies play hardball with dual-licensing - so if you want it for free, you better love GPLv3! :-)
Paying a shitton of money to established company like Red Hat, on another hand, gives you a contract with liabilities and all other stuff that you'll be able to lean on - and cover your ass with, if need arises.