Ask HN: Would your company pay for priority support of OSS from core members?
There's a lot of talk about making open source sustainable, but most of it appears to revolve around generating code in some fashion (bug fixes, features, etc.)
However, what if we were indirectly support OSS by just paying for email support? As an example, $100 pays for the email to go to the top of the list and be seen/responded to by a core contributor in X amount of time. A little back of the paper math leads me to believe that for every email responded to, it funds 1 hour of developer time (perhaps more, perhaps less, depending on that person's rate).
This way those with deep pockets get support they need and the software's development isn't dictated by features for money.
I believe there is a whole category of businesses who do not have the resources to hire full time developers to work on OSS, but have developers in house whose productivity could be greatly enhanced by just a little nudge in the right direction by those who know the most.
The problem with this is where does the money go? Does it go to the original creator? Does it go to the person with the most commits? One would have to create a company that deals with that kind of stuff, similar to what Fire Giant did with Wix. They contribute back to the OSS project but they also make their own changes that they charge for and aren't contributed back.