This is my theory: we have missed a critical element of how FOSS got adopted in the industry in the first place. That blind spot explains a lot of the problems we have had with getting compensation to FOSS authors, which has created a whole other set of problems for us to deal with.

In the middle of the S curve for adoption, software development teams were struggling with the fact that someone in finance laughed at the idea of spending money to make money. R&D is a cost center, and anything that reduced costs would make life better for the company. Well, any costs except labor, which are some magic other shade of money that can't tell that you just spent 1000 man hours on something that should have taken 300 but you first had to squeeze another application onto aging hardware that was slower than what some of the developers have at home.

In some cases these people were power tripping. They seemed to enjoy being able to say 'no' to any requests, able to use their purchasing veto power to make you do what they want you to do. Everyone had one of these stories. Many had one about the current employer.

Then along came Open Source. When you said, "I want to use X" and this person said, "We're not paying for that, no," you could cheerily shoot back, "Oh but that's the best part, it's free, so you don't have to pay for it. Have a nice day!" and tralala your way back to your desk while they are left trying to think of a way to force you to do things their way. That is why it's used everywhere. Because nobody could stop us.

So we've democratized the power dynamic quite a bit (you still have general managers forcing teams to use Oracle because otherwise they have to explain why they have been sending that much money to Oracle if half the applications are running on Postgres, so they pull the dick move of banning Postgres), but that money problem is still there, as it always has been. If I can't buy copies of TeamCity, which is commercial software with a commercial license, I sure as hell can't get the company to send $100 with no contract to some internet randos just because I say they're saving us a million dollars a year.

You can't educate your way into fixing that problem. People have been trying literally for decades. There's a plumbing problem here, and until that gets fixed you can plead with people all you want to fund OSS, but it's not going to happen.