[mrob]

You don't need "quasi-open-source" to solve the coordination problem you describe. It can be solved with a threshold pledge system[0]. People agree to donate money, and the developer agrees to release the code once sufficient money is donated. There can be a time limit after which the donations are returned if the threshold isn't met.

This has actually worked in practice: Blender was originally proprietary software, but the copyright holder agreed to release it under the GPL after collecting 100K EUR in donations. After 7 weeks they collected enough donations and Blender was released as FOSS as promised.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_pledge_system

[ChadNauseam]

The kickstarter model is awesome and should be used more but it clearly doesn't fully solve the problem. It works great for kickstarter because kickstarter projects aren't public goods (if you pay the money you get the thing you paid money for). In general it doesn't make as much sense for open source because you get the same thing whether you pay or not (unless you're the tiebreaker), so your incentive to pay is limited.