On 2020-01-20 14:54:02 -0600 (-0600), Eric K. Miller wrote: [...]
I'm not a developer, rather an operator. I just thought I'd ask if the OpenStack community had thought about creating a fund for developers that may want to contribute, but can only do it for a fee. Essentially a donation bucket. I don't know if the OpenStack Foundation does this or not already. There may be adequate need for fwaas, for example, but not enough volunteer resources to do it. However there may be money in multiple operators' budgets that can be used to donate to the support of a project.
Our community has mostly relied on commercial distribution vendors and service providers to fill that role in the past. If enough of their customers say it's a feature they're relying on, then employing developers who can help keep it maintained is their raison d'être. This is how pretty much all free/libre open source community software projects work. -- Jeremy Stanley