And you can also market that you are part of a strong consortium. Stef
then what are the benefits for the companies paying the fee (apart of the moral of help build pharo) ?
I think that the idea of the consortium is to create an entity that provides resources for further development of Pharo.
It is all good and well to use open source and free stuff (and of course, Pharo will remain open source and free to use), but as a commercial user you have a couple of needs: you want Pharo to remain alive and well, active and growing and you will want support. All that takes resources (money/time). For many well known open source projects there are foundations and/or large companies paying for engineers. Pharo needs some of that as well.
I think it is a good idea.
Sven