Contract work is tricky because individuals who own a particular project may be full time employed already and not capable of taking on contract work. Not every project is capable of generating enough contract work to make it sustainable to do it full time and not everyone wants that level of instability on their income.
Hiring an outside company to do contract work leads to longer term maintenance issues where they disappear after the contract completes. It would be better to have individuals from a distributed set of organizations all collectively pitch in to do maintenance. This is how the Linux project is organized and it's very successful. While this is understandably unlikely to happen for smaller projects I think that just means it's important for projects to be created and maintained by larger collectives. Again, this is a common trend you see occur.
Hiring an outside company to do contract work leads to longer term maintenance issues where they disappear after the contract completes. It would be better to have individuals from a distributed set of organizations all collectively pitch in to do maintenance. This is how the Linux project is organized and it's very successful. While this is understandably unlikely to happen for smaller projects I think that just means it's important for projects to be created and maintained by larger collectives. Again, this is a common trend you see occur.