> Let me introduce you to the group of companies that belong to
https://www.bcorporation.net/Whilst I have heard of B Corporation, I will admit I don't know a great deal about it/them.
However a brief look round their website suggests to me that what they do is basically structured ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance).
ESG is somewhat different to what we are talking about here. ESG has become a hot-topic in the corporate world, especially for listed companies where investors can now screen for companies based on ESG metrics.
Over-simplified definition of ESG is treating your staff well (working conditions etc), treating your immediate community well (not polluting rivers etc) and contributing to good causes through corporate philanthropy.
The whole point is ESG is about how corporations interact with the humans in their operational environment.
BUT You cannot extrapolate ESG to open-source software, because ultimately, if you look at it through the corporate eye, software is software. And the corporate eye looks at software through the legal (licensing) lens, because that gives them something tangible and measurable to work with, which is the preferred modus-operandi of the corporate mind.
Therefore if a piece of software is openly published with an extremely permissive license then you cannot blame the corporation for taking the path of least resistance (i.e. using it inline with the written terms of the license, which, depending on the license wording, could be little more than ensuring a credit is written in the correct places).
Again, this comes down to the problem with scale. If you have tens of thousands of employees, software licensing is difficult, and if you had to "do deals" for each and every piece of open-source software then it would very quickly become unmanageable.
Equally, a typical corporation with thousands of employees, could easily use thousands of pieces of open-source software. Because there is no price-tag on open-source software, you would then be in a position of having to engage in lengthly discussions that involve multiple departments in order to agree on what to pay each and every open-source developer. It all becomes very messy very quickly.
Don't get me wrong, I see where you are coming from on this.
But to be perfectly honest, OSS developers are not entirely without blame here.
Sitting there, releasing code on an overly permissive license and then wondering why nobody is paying you .... it's sort of a case of dream life meeting harsh reality, really.
OSS developers live in the wishy-washy world of subjective views and "moral duty".
Corporations need standardisation and clarity because otherwise they descend into chaos.
The easiest way to do that is through less-permissive licenses that have a clear requirement for remuneration.
Otherwise, if you start talking about "donations" or anything else, then you start walking into that subjective ground again. And especially in terms of "donations", every man and his dog thinks corporates are "rich" and can afford to donate to their cause. So your request for "donations" will be lumped in the in-box along with everyone else's.