Instead of expecting corporate users to pay (which can be difficult, corporate finance depts are good at spending large sums of money, but suck at small expenses), or acknowledge use (company policies might mean employees are not allowed to), perhaps the major hosting providers such as Github and Gitlab can directly remunerate open source repo maintainers depending on the popularity of the hosted repo? Surely they make a lot of money by more and more devs adopting their service?
Edit: I am the owner of an open source repo on Github which was quite popular a while ago, but fell into disrepair because I could no longer find the time to maintain it. So I understand the pain of this person.
Edit: I am the owner of an open source repo on Github which was quite popular a while ago, but fell into disrepair because I could no longer find the time to maintain it. So I understand the pain of this person.