[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)