The answer I think is "make it simple". Create some central clearinghouse/website the business side of these big companies can give a check too, in return they get an account, the techies/programmers from the company use said account to fill in what technologies/projects they're using, the cash gets distributed between said projects, the clearing house handles all that.
I don't think it would take more than a little prodding to make a company like Google contribute to something like that, so long as it's easy.
I don't really think that Google's problem is the inconvenience of having to cut a bunch of checks to the people they want to support, as if they were desperately short of people with administrative skills.
Spot on. It’s the same as the Apple/iTunes micropayment model. I buy lots of little things from Apple because I don’t have to go through payment process each time.
Companies often want strategic influence on OSS software, as well as maintenance. This would be difficult to run through a clearinghouse. When a project is larger, it can be part of an existing OSS foundation, where there is more experience with arbitrating such conflicts between donors.
Big donors, yes. But firms with this motivation are already involved. I think the problem is how to engage the long tail of small / medium firms that rely on OSS but aren't sufficiently engaged to try to shape them.
Actually, you could get the government involved here. There could be a tax break for the first $X of contributions to open source. That would effectively make a public subsidy to OSS, directed by market forces. Pretty cool
FLOSS currently gets extra scrutiny ("BOLO", which usually means "no") when applying for 501c3 status. The reasoning is to avoid a situation like the following:
Google has some extremely-Google-specific work they want done. Google spins up a project to do it as an external entity, and "donates" the money to make it happen. Google takes that as a tax deduction, and meanwhile the 501c3 gets all the other tax benefits a 501c3 gets (often property tax exemption, for instance).
This is a fair objection, to a point - an organization whose sole purpose is to benefit a for-profit company should probably be paying property tax. I think they take it too far - "Be On Look Out" is appropriate, but it shouldn't mean "no" when projects are genuinely creating value that is broadly accessible.
Your narrower program described above also solves the problem, albeit arguably in a patchier way. The money from Google that would be spent on business expenses anyway wouldn't have been taxed anyway.
I don't think it would take more than a little prodding to make a company like Google contribute to something like that, so long as it's easy.