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> Won’t you wish you’d invested in yourself, org, and community?

Many might prefer to have shipped features/products in a timely manner instead and how their performance reviews would look, as opposed to some notion of community.

The situations where you can say: "I'm blocked and am waiting on the library/tool developer to have a look at my GitHub issue, so no new release will be shipped until then," are probably not plentiful. Situations where the person in question can contribute a solution of their own are also not as plentiful as we might like. Situations where the person in question is capable of either solving the problem just for themselves (with a custom build of the tool/library) are also not as plentiful as one might hope, due to possibly different skillsets.

Making the functionality someone else's problem behind a contract of some sort feels like a decent choice in an enterprise setting, which is why you see many purchase something like RHEL licenses because of the support, or why many prefer to overpay for cloud services instead of running everything on prem, or even use paid tools that are "standard" within the niche of the industry that they work in.

For many, the circumstances in which they'll adopt FOSS primarily centers around someone else already having done the majority of the work and the solution being good enough: something like MySQL/MariaDB/PostgreSQL in the database space and something like Angular/Vue/React in the front end space, or any number of libraries/frameworks for back end development, tools like Visual Studio Code or Git, OSes like GNU/Linux or other Linux distros and so on.

One might also argue that a lot of the successful FOSS projects out there actually have corporate backing, but perhaps that's besides the point.

I donated like 4K early into GIMP 15 years later it’s still an unusable mess in a professional environment.

Hire dairy farmers to get the milk for your coffee - absolute insight into how it's produced. Also they got to raise cows from calves so no milk in the office for a while. But once you get it you can be sure it's organic !

That's not even going into the dev market situation right now ...

I mean seriously have you people ever been near a situation where these kind of decisions are made ?

Sure, this is ideal given unlimited time and money, but hiring dedicated devs for tooling is going to be expensive. And once they fix "the problem," they're still on payroll. Yay they'll keep fixing problems and improving the software, but it's basically the most expensive software subscription model imaginable.