One of the neat things about working at Yahoo! when I did (which was when it still had the "!" as part of the branding) was knowing that we had a small number of FreeBSD core maintainers on the payroll, and that those folks could get hardware if they needed it for the FreeBSD project. Not to provide infrastructure to the project, but to give those core maintainers hardware to use and to add support for. We just provided them with the things they needed, almost no questions asked.

Those people didn't answer to anyone, they were just paid to work on the OS. Yahoo! made heavy use of FreeBSD at the time (almost 20 years ago, now) so it was decided that since we were using this free software so extensively that it would be good to give back to that community.

I wish this notion that giving a small amount of resources to open source projects that have saved your company millions of dollars per year was more common than it is. I don't know of any large company that does what Yahoo! did back then.

I work for a large company now, and as far as anyone I've asked can tell, we give exactly nothing to any of the hundreds or possibly thousands of open source projects we use daily, and it does not put a good feeling in my stomach.