It'll be a lot easier to get the company I work at to do the same if I can convince them that it will benefit their monetary bottom line. So I, for one, would really like selfish benefits to helping FOSS projects.
How does your company feel about "priority support"? You might phrase it in the same way: we're using package X so we're paying mantainer to fix the bugs we encounter and help us in critical times. It'll cost us twice to do this internally.
