> and I've gone through all the hoops to get paid (PO, billing, invoices, registering to large companies is a lot of paperwork, tbh, but well..) and we try and bill small to large companies that depends on those projects.
I see an opportunity to create a "create-a-company"-as-a-service, to help tons of other maintainers to do this with ease.
Although being capable of sending a bill is part of the problem, I suspect a bigger problem is getting your bill in front of someone who has the budget, the mandate and the inclination to pay it.
A lot of companies have a lot more controls on purchasing than they do on employee salaries. So a manager who has ten $100k developers reporting to them might only have $10k they can spend at their own discretion.
And the unix philosophy of having many small tools and libraries means practically nobody is _just_ using one open source product. So even if you can get your bill to someone with a million dollars to spend, if they have to share it between 1000 open source projects it's not going to go very far.
Why not just have an intermediate company that handles the donation/support aspects? I mean, we already have Open Collective: https://opencollective.com/ and for other content creators the likes of Patreon also work out nicely.
Two examples, off the top of my head:
1) Here's how Open Collective looks, for jMonkeyEngine (a lovely Java game engine that's also a bit underfunded and underutilized): https://opencollective.com/jmonkeyengine
Why would large enterprises not just use a tool like that, if they already use the likes of AWS or other IaaS/PaaS/SaaS offerings?
But i definitely agree that a lot of open source is underfunded and as a consequence many can't work on it full time or even every day, because things are dire financially otherwise: https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html
It feels to me that perhaps the solution here is to have something like a bot on GitHub/GitLab, that adds a comment to issues: "If you'd like to express to the maintainers how important this issue is and draw more attention to it, then submit a payment here: ... Payments so far: ... (possibly with messages by supporters)"
Most people don't care about Open Collective or GitHub Sponsors or whatever, they just want to make feature requests or bug reports. If their attention is captured and the ability to make their own request/report more visible is offered to them as a part of that process, maybe things would be a bit better? I've definitely heard the sentiment expressed that micropayments have the potential to improve how we interact with others on the web in some ways, i'm just not sure how viable that is.
> But! Maintainers need to be legible to the big company department that approves and processes those invoices. Think about it: no company pays their law firm on Patreon. You'd be amazed how much harder it is to explain "what the fuck is an open collective?" for a $10k donation, compared to paying a $100k invoice to an LLC that filed a W-9 or W-8BEN and takes payment through ACH. The trick is that you can easily incorporate a pass-through US LLC and open a business account for it even if you're not a US citizen, it's not rocket science.
And yet, these companies basically pay monthly to AWS, which isn't all that different on a conceptual level. Needing a LLC just to receive donations of any sort is ridiculous, why can't these companies just be more humane, instead of drown the idea of doing anything good into needless bureaucracy?
I see an opportunity to create a "create-a-company"-as-a-service, to help tons of other maintainers to do this with ease.