My thought though is that this is preventative care. This is going to the Doctor regularly so you don’t get surprised when something goes awry. Likewise, making sure the OSS project you’re totally dependent on doesn’t suffer a catastrophic failure or abandonment is a worthy investment.

That pretty much sums it up.

It's why money is unlikely to flow from businesses into open source projects unless the developers are employed by those businesses, in which case the question often becomes "why are we paying to develop software that will be given away free to our competitors?"

Of course the best business strategy under current rules would be to let other companies pay here. That would net you a competitive advantage. Perhaps GPL was right in the end and companies need to be forced to either contribute or pay for commercial alternatives. Maybe some would learn how expensive software really is and that it requires constant investment of maintenance as most other products do as well.