Nobody is managing a big corporation because he cared about keeping his name on Santa's "nice" list. The donations that big corps do make are carefully calculated performative virtue - aka marketing - which they make only if, when, and where they feel confident of a positive ROI.<p>Or, very occasionally they are <i>de facto</i> buying software support with "donations".
"Hey, Boss, I want to spend money on something that we already have. The benefits that spending will return are conditional, probabilistic, and long term, if any."<p>Its not an easy sell.<p>Several people have done fine work in providing example sales pitches, articulating the benefits of supporting open source generally and maintainers specifically. Even with that kind of help, it's still a hard sell.<p>Many business are run for today with no regard for tomorrow, stiff suppliers and contractors and come back next quarter whining about "but if you won't extend more credit you'll be taking hundreds of jobs!" Actual legal obligations don't mean much to those people; they'll never care about a commonwealth.<p>The better type of business still has far more things to do with their money than care for an apparently healthy and vibrant common ecosystem. Usually, the best they can do some public relations spending on par with the rest of their charity work.
I’ve never had a budget for donations as an engineer. That money would go through some other part of the organization.<p>I have had discretionary budgets many many times. I could easily give part of that budget to open source maintainers but I’ve also never found one that made it easy to get an invoice.
<i>As a user of something open source you are not thereby entitled to anything at all.</i><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39905557">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39905557</a><p>Corporations are paying in equal measure.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. If the software is ok and it's free, why throw money at it? Companies generally spend as little money as possible. The tech industry in the past 10 years was an aberration, because it was fueled by cheap VC money who see tech as "winner take all" market (which means that, if you outspend your competition, you will eventually end up with a money-printing monopoly). Hence, the $400k packages for individual contributors.
In general companies won't pay people to do things when they are willing to do it for free. There are exceptions. Linus Torvalds is paid by the Linux Foundation, which is funded by big corporations <a href="https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members" rel="nofollow">https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members</a> .
They do, but indirectly. They pay Red Hat (RHEL) or SuSE or another commercial vendor for support. That vendor then hires programmers who contribute patches back to the Linux kernel and user space apps. For critical projects, they hire core team members.
It's tedious to accomplish and not common, but it can be done: <a href="https://tech.target.com/blog/open-source-fund" rel="nofollow">https://tech.target.com/blog/open-source-fund</a>
In my experience (~10 companies, including bigger tech and silicon valley companies) the bigger the size the lower (if not zero) the awareness. In smaller companies and startup I've seen much more "empathy" and we used to give one-shot or recurrent sponsorship especially to projects that we were using extensively. This could also be a partial answer though, bigger companies don't really care as they could afford (or perceive so at the higher level in the ladder) to just move away or fork the project and maintain it themselves, thing that I've also seen applied in a famous telecommunication API company (guess who).