> Surely companies should want an active relationship with the developers of their most important and fundamental projects as well.

This sets up a false dichotomy. We _do_ have active relationships with the developers of our most important and fundamental projects.

> establish a business relationship to satisfy what open source licenses leave lacking

We do this. We pay on contract for work we need. This is separate from that.

> the results they are hoping for

The result we are hoping for at a company level is to give a more-or-less fair amount of money in return for the value we have received over the past year from sponsorship-seeking Open Source maintainers. I think of this as IOR instead of ROI—we are paying for value already received. This result is achieved. :)

Our hypothesis is that through social validation we can encourage other companies to follow suit, and if we're successful enough this could create opportunities that don't exist now. The $25k/yr scenarios you describe would be the bottom rung of this. FOSSFunders.com is where we're pursuing this. Wish us luck! :)