Red Hat sort of did that when they had their IPO. They allowed contributors to the open source they used to buy Red Hat shares during their IPO at the IPO price.
They were remarkably generous in who they considered to be a contributor for this. For example, I found a bug in trn that caused it to trash .newsrc files on Red Hat. I spent about 30 minutes figuring out what was going on, and submitted a patch to Red Hat to fix it. It was a very simple patch, merely changing a declaration of one variable from char to unsigned int [1].
This was enough for Red Hat to classify me as a contributor and invite me to participate in the IPO. I bought $2000 worth of their stock at the IPO price on the morning of the IPO, and sold it that afternoon for $9000.
[1] There was some function or macro that given a character returned a set of flags indicating if the character was upper case, lower case, numeric, etc., and apparently on all other systems the flags that trn cared about where in the lower 8 bits, and so storing the flags in a char worked. On the then newest Red Hat, that was not true.
Because I think that owning a tiny shareholding in a business is more hassle than it's worth for everyone involved. Options is more of a possibility, but again, more hassle than just cash. And involves more explanation to non-techies who won't understand, and will possibly intervene.
I can just put "software licence" as a budget line item and make a payment, and everyone's happy, no questions asked.
> What prevents me from making Microsoft a 1% shareholder of my company Cockwombles Inc?
I don't see the mechanism by which this would be possible. Companies (and individuals) are not under some legal obligation to accept donations.
> Or giving them a specific exemption in my license for the cockwomble software library?
I've seen licenses over the years that say things like "this software cannot be used by companies or contractors working in the defense industry" or "this is free except when used by FrombleCo, which will need to pay me $500 per user." I suppose it's a way of expressing your disapproval of FrombleCo (or the defense industry), although I'm not sure how I really feel about that approach personally.
