[jraph]

Such a thing needs to be carefully designed.

It can lead to difficult situations for maintainers, where they were not willing to accept some work and didn't have the chance to express this (yet) (lack of time for instance), and now they have a work that somebody else paid for but didn't really want to accept but rejecting it could be harder, emotionally. So you would need at least an okay from them.

[wahnfrieden]

I know those things must be accounted for. However I believe there’s a strong opportunity there. Many projects will accept PRs and merge them, but not take much lead on the project and soliciting particular contributions top-down, or promoting community requests into top down calls to action. And they already field PRs from people paid to produce them (a lot of open source contribution happens on company time)

I would even be happy to fund the work done in a fork until the maintainers decide or not to accept the PR. Whether the PR gets merged upstream is sometimes a secondary concern. The bounty for this work in a fork should still be advertised by community in upstream repo though (inside an issue ticket etc)