Hi, how do companies "pay" for their use of Open Source software? (if at all!)

I keep my eyes on the job pages. One I saw today asked for people "enthusiastic about open source".

I have always worked for companies who default to Microsoft and have never really thought about this before.

So if a company is using CentOS/LibreOffice/whatever and feel like they should be putting something back into the community what do people do in the real world? $$$ is the obvious answer. Is there any kind of model where staff work on FOSS projects during company time?

Cheers

Larger companies will often contribute time and resources to projects, doing outright development etc., but TBH it's pretty rare and not something that any company should feel "guilty" about if they don't do. It's not like these projects are there shaking a donation bucket should you feel you had a good experience etc., it's free and can be treated as such.

Personally I've technically "improved" products by submitting a few patches and feature requests that are adopted. Not something I've spent much time doing, but things like that do happen. If you have a bug in a commercial bit of software you'll broadly need to use your paid support to request a fix and wait for them to provide it. with FOSS you generally have the option of going and understanding the issue in the code and fixing it yourself. Give your fix back to the community as an after thought, and you've helped them.

ive worked at a few companies that do not allow modifications to any source code of opensource projects because they don't want to "give away their work" in those cases I have documented problems and will post changes to be made in the proper channels. Or if i run across ways for documentation to be improved i will submit the corrections as bug reports.