I will on occasion email an OSS maintainer offering to pay for some improvement or consulting. But I don't do this often because of the friction. In other I can't even find their email, but then it feels awkward to publicly post this in a GH issue.
Completely agree. I've run into this many times too and having talked with a lot of companies, I know the same is true for a lot of them. As Polar removes the friction here, it will hopefully accelerate our ability to sponsor such efforts
