Of course it does.<p>There is a thing about open source and I would submit, many uses of the Internet, that ESR (and others) talked about early on, and that's use value.<p>Because the entire work product is available to anyone, the use value is high. There is a skill / understanding investment to make, and while that is expected, it can get ignored, or overemphasized in these discussions.<p>Once someone has made the skill investment, they need only entertain incremental change type investments.<p>Overall, great return on investment. Anyone learning *nix systems can get a ton of work done, and or have set themselves up to explore and benefit from a large number of technologies.<p>The point ESR made is simple:<p>Nobody is really working for free. They are getting the use value, and it's non-trivial. In the case of some important developers, use value is not enough. Can't eat it, or live in it. Fair enough.<p>In this way, OSS is a whole that really is greater than it's parts, and high use value is why.<p>Contributions, and their cost, are multiplied across users and that is often enough to warrant making said contributions. Anyone doing that can improve their use value, and anyone may see the benefit of other contributions.<p>None of that has really changed, but for large corporations deriving significant financial returns, all of which further demonstrate the huge use value in play.<p>I submit this high degree of use also comes with more demands for contributions than an average user / developer too. Funding this should be a no brainer given the extremely low costs needed to see awesome use value and potential to profit.<p>Seriously, the larger players are making plenty. It's my opinion more financial contributions can and should be made, and made in a way that leaves plenty of agency for those who receive them too.<p>Without that, it could be a sort of tragedy of the commons scenario. OSS is awesome, but could be a lot less awesome if this is not improved.<p>Surely an ecosystem like this can be maintained from the billions that it has helped others earn. We say greed is good. Well, so is a degree of fairness, and some respect for that which has delivered so much too.<p>If not, the question, "why should I bother?" is totally fair, and will present itself more and more over time.<p>And this:<p>>It’s still not clear that companies would be interested in such a contract. When Stenberg asked the company that needed him to fly to a different country to troubleshoot their problem to pay for one, they refused.<p>They totally got their use value. If they can't be bothered to help with the code, paying for said help is totally reasonable.<p>What drives that?<p>Perhaps some important people can start posing the question:<p>Either help with code, or dollars, which is it because everyone needs to help?