You can call me cheap or unthankful, but for me open source contribution is kind of a zero sum game.
I'm not willing to spend money on maintainers fixing their stuff, but I'm also not expecting anything in return. I think out of ~15? years of sporadic contributions to dozens of projects all tangible rewards I've got were a single CD from my amazon wishlist and a handful of stickers and t-shirts (the kind that are not handed out in dozens at conferences.)
If we're talking about "using open source software for business, e.g. making money" then I'd probably be most happy with an "office hours" model, e.g. paying a maintainer/core contributor X per 1-2h of their time to help me troubleshoot/get started. That's usually all I/we need, seldom it would be "give me a specialist freelancer for days or weeks".
That said, I do think it's very sad that (at least in my experience) self-marketing is everything, so for example if you don't contribute at all to project X but can show a slightly better talk proposal (with a mainstream/beginner) topic, you're invited to speak and the people who focus on code/bugs/whatever and less on being rockstar presenters get picked less for "boring internals talks" (this depends on the community of course).
I'm not willing to spend money on maintainers fixing their stuff, but I'm also not expecting anything in return. I think out of ~15? years of sporadic contributions to dozens of projects all tangible rewards I've got were a single CD from my amazon wishlist and a handful of stickers and t-shirts (the kind that are not handed out in dozens at conferences.)
If we're talking about "using open source software for business, e.g. making money" then I'd probably be most happy with an "office hours" model, e.g. paying a maintainer/core contributor X per 1-2h of their time to help me troubleshoot/get started. That's usually all I/we need, seldom it would be "give me a specialist freelancer for days or weeks".
That said, I do think it's very sad that (at least in my experience) self-marketing is everything, so for example if you don't contribute at all to project X but can show a slightly better talk proposal (with a mainstream/beginner) topic, you're invited to speak and the people who focus on code/bugs/whatever and less on being rockstar presenters get picked less for "boring internals talks" (this depends on the community of course).