The problem with companies contributing to existing open source projects is that it creates even more unpaid labor for the maintainers, who now have to review and discuss and commit to future maintenance of those contributions.
Meanwhile they still aren't learning any money to allow them to commit more of their own time to the projects!
No. This allows companies to seize control of FOSS projects.
FLOSS is used by everybody and should not be driven a single corporation.
Just like cities vs company town.
Besides because of the license FLOSS has a built in escape hatch if you don't like the direction a corporation is going. I recognize your concern I just think the risk is far lower than you do.
Contributing improvements externally allows the project to remain independent. And if the maintainer is overburdened they can decline the patches or postpone review. Nobody is forcing them to accept the changes.
I don't know how you would see the evidence of the company imposing their will on the project - that's not likely to happen in public. It's also very likely to happen without any explicit influence taking place at all.
If a company hired me to work full-time on one of my projects, and I had to pick between two competing priorities for my time, I would naturally take my employer's own preferences and current challenges into account when making that decision. I wouldn't even consider that to be a bad thing.
The problem with money translating to power is not unique to this arrangement, in any case. Donations can be similarly withdrawn, after all, so they also create an implicit bias. The only way to fix this is to make it so that people don't have to rely on such sources of income to sustain themselves.
Projects which don't have such governance are self-limiting in terms of [popularity x complexity]. At some point, tensions arise as a complex project which cannot scale its maintainers and cannot service all of its users.
Open source devs don't owe anybody support, but the marketplace doesn't owe them popularity either.
From experience the ratio of random drive-by contributors to people who regularly contribute high-quality code to the point of qualifying as a "maintainer" is something like 20:1 or worse. That doesn't mean they become maintainers, just that 1 out of every 20 might have the chops, if they dedicated to it. This is true even of corporate contributors from well staffed companies; they only want me to accept the patch so they can do something else. I have literally had corporate engineers file reports to me saying "Please do this" (not maliciously, mind you) and when I respond "I don't have time", but actually knew the person in question enough to follow up with "But I would trust you to do this if I added you as a maintainer, since it's not hard", and they still rejected it as, effectively, "too much responsibility." Didn't even get to the point of whether their work would let them have time for it or not. They have no interest beyond that, I can't blame them in a sense.
The idea that most projects actually have enough well-intended, frequent, sufficiently informed contributors to merit any actual "governance" structure at all beyond "Whatever the one or two authors do to make it all work" is completely detached from the reality of my own experience, is all I can say. And that's the reality for most open source projects that aren't stupidly famous, have literally zero monetary funding, and are still very important.
While there is surely a long tail of Open Source projects which don't have (and shouldn't have) such a governance structure, many of the most widely used projects do. The bargain that project founders make is giving newcomers a real governance stake and thus ceding some control over the project, in order to make it worthwhile for contributors (and their employers) to invest — with some contributors eventually becoming maintainers.
> The reality of the situation is almost nobody actually wants to maintain anything unless they are paid to do so
True. And that's perhaps why ASF-style governance has found a niche in Open Source: it provides one solution to a problem often seen as intractable.
But the whole thread is about contributions from companies, where the employers are paid to do the companys biddinf. And while individuals might be apprehensive about doing maintenance, I see less reason for companies to want to avoid maintenance.
Good companies fund, great companies maintain
The point is; contributions to the Open-Source ecosystem are usually much more valuable than paying random open-source projects a small donation.
An engineer submitting a bug fix might be worth hundreds/thousands of dollars of labour donated to the project.