[jeffmould]

IANAL and this based completely on my own opinion, but no.

While in theory it sounds good. It has huge holes that would need to be covered, and by the time you start covering those holes you have gone back to the reason you need things like vesting and cliffs in the first place.

How do you determine what the contribution itself is worth in terms of shares? How do you handle dilution? How do you handle co-founder disagreements? What happens if an early contributor leaves after a month? What happens to their shares? What happens if the company needs to take funding? How do you handle stock grants? The list of questions goes on and on, and by the time you account for all the questions, paid an attorney to address them all, you might as well have just created a traditional company.

The different with open-source is there is no "expectation" of financial gain from contributing. Once you start mixing a financial aspect you will have individuals with different goals and intentions. That's a bad mix in my opinion.