Oliver,
It's not because it is open source that the development neccessarily has to be free.
You could also try to raise an internal budget to sponsor the open source solution.
Thanks for your offer which is highly appreciated.
Of course is the prefered way to have an open source solution.
However depending on the license model involved our corporate policy might (!) require that the result of our investment is kept internal if we use a coporate budget.
However we had a few projects in the past where we have given back some changes to open source projects due to the restrictive GPL.
So chances are high that something commonly available will be possible. A not so welcome option could be to branch the existing code with a new commercial license. I do not appreciate this myself.
Actually it is hard to create a budget and pay external resources due to political, commercial and financial issues in our business.
Personally I have spent more than half of my professional life actively supporting several open source projects (of which one was the Mozilla browser) so I hope to know about all aspects involved.
Thanks again for the offer, I will consider it when the issue becomes clearer.
Best regards,
Oliver