I tried at work to get some money to the maintainer of iRAP, an RNA sequencing analysis pipeline we depend on heavily at the moment. But business sees this as wasted money, it's there for free, why not take it? Reading this, I think I'm going to double down on my efforts again. We get so much value out of a huge pile of FOSS software, we should be donating. Meanwhile we have spend piles of money on Matlab for years and we aren't even allowed to run Linux on our Laptops if we wanted to.
I think someone on here recently suggested to a project that they provide an "enterprise subscription" or something like that with minor benefits to make it easier for businesses to justify (or maybe it made administration easier?) to "donate". You could suggest that to the maintainer, and then use that to convince business that you need that.
