When you hire an open source developer, you hire someone who works all the time--not just 8-5, not just at a desk, not just on that one pet project that management's currently excited about. They work on that, they work on the related libraries, they work on projects that use those libraries, they work on the next great version of the libraries the company will need in two more years.

Plan for your own future by letting your developers explore it for you. They already are...even before you've hired them.

If anything is missing with regards to open source within companies (of all sizes), it's this situation.

Teaching "companies" (or rather the entire management stack/chain) how to "effectively contribute and participate in upstream projects" could change the game for those companies, the projects they interface with, and certainly for the developers (inside and outside of the companies).