While I love the idea of a better deal for free and open source software developers, I don't think a sales/transactional model will actually solve the problem at scale.

For one thing, it will eat away at the reasons you like open solutions in the first place. If it became normal/expected to pay for open source software, businesses would control a lot more open source software.

> when there's no money in it, the work tends to focus in areas of passion and feature development.

But when there is money in it, the work tends to focus on quarterly revenue.

> funding to hire QA people and engineers to fix things like Ubuntu's suspend/resume on my Lenovo laptop, you know?

Surely the money you gave to Lenovo would cover that? Like there must be $1 in each laptop they sell that could have gone towards even documenting the hardware so some nice developer can implement a working driver/whatever. Really, it's not the Ubuntu or Linux people that need to be paid to solve that problem, Lenovo is free to submit a patch whenever the hell they want to, they just don't want to.

> businesses would control a lot more open source software

Only because individuals would presumably open LLCs

> But when there is money in it, the work tends to focus on quarterly revenue.

I don't think the choice is between "John works on this project 11pm - 1am on the days he feels like it" and "John wants to IPO his company". I'm advocating for "John works on this project 3 days of the week because people pay him a small fee for using his project".

> Surely the money you gave to Lenovo would cover that?

The money I gave to Lenovo went to Microsoft for an OEM license to the pre-installed Windows OS. When I download Ubuntu and install that on my laptop, Lenovo couldn't be bothered to see if closing the lid suspends the laptop or not.

Should Lenovo write drivers for my custom kernel as well? As a business, why should Lenovo bother to implement resume capabilities for an OS that is a rounding error for their consumer line of laptops?