[albertzeyer]

I think it is a nice idea to finance the development via Kickstarter.

I think this could become much more common for common big open source projects, i.e. some particular interesting missing feature or redesign which might need anyway some professional designer or so - financed by the community. And if I am interested in the particular feature, I am also very open to spend a bit money there.

Also, by doing separate campaigns for separate features/goals, you could see where the user really is interested in. For example, in this particular feature (a Win8 Metra GUI for VLC), I am not interested at all so I wont really give any money there. But if it would be something which I would like to have, I definitely would.

[albertzeyer]

Another thought, going even further: I would also very happy to work on many other open source projects if I would be paid for.

Maybe there could be an open platform similar to Kickstarter but maybe the users itself could suggest features and obligatory say how much money they would spend. And developers would say on what things they would want to work on. In the end, probably the project maintainers would then decide to start it and select the developers for it.

Or alternatively: People would not determine the amount of money obligatory but they would just say some amount. Developers would register for it. And then the users again would decide for what developers (or maybe other external needed resources) they would give how much money and if some constraints are given, it can be made final. That way, the official project maintainers would not have to maintain this work and many more random features on random open source projects, maybe even abandoned ones could be implemented.

[tantrix]

Such a thing actually already exists! Take a look at BountySource: https://www.bountysource.com/

As a backer you can put cash bounties on Github issues (other trackers to come) and when a project committer accepts a pull request for that issue, the developer gets paid.

On the flip side, we're about to launch Fundraisers, which is very similar to the Kickstarter model: create a project spec and get it funded. We're building specifically for open source, rather than a generic platform.

We'd love to hear your thoughts! (#bountysource on freenode)