No, you can hire programmers to hack on the software. You don't call the authors, wave money at them, and tell them to fix a problem for you.

The programmers you hire don't have to be the authors (that wouldn't scale in most cases anyway), but they may very well become regular contributors.

Sure you can hire someone. But it's cheaper to buy commercial software.

Free Software does not mean "non-commercial" software. With Free Software you are not restricted to just one model of getting problems fixed.

It also doesn't seem correct to say that "it's cheaper" to buy software, when the issue here is fixing problems. Buying a software artifact is unrelated to getting service. Besides, it may very well be cheaper to hire a person to hack on a number of software projects than to pay for a service contract for each of the projects.

> Free Software does not mean "non-commercial" software.

If free software cannot work for business then that's exactly what it means.

> But it's cheaper to buy commercial software.

Not once you start needing bespoke customizations, which is why companies generally start hiring programmers to hack on open source projects for them.

You'll pay through the nose when contracting a commercial company to do special snowflake work to their product just for your needs.

This is why companies like RedHat exist in the first place.