Synergy does this. You buy votes with a donation and then you apply the votes to issues in the issue tracker. They recently fixed a bug that had been there for a long time but the devs thought wasn't important until a lot of people started voting for it with their dollars.

It seems that this might encourage developers to leave bugs outstanding or introduce new ones as a way to generate revenue though, unless a similar scheme is used to fund 'new features' and not just bugs.

> It seems that this might encourage developers to leave bugs outstanding or introduce new ones as a way to generate revenue though

Emphasizing this. This is why the police sometimes oppose safe streets and raised speed limits: it decreases their revenue from speeding tickets. It's a fairly well-known problem, though I've never heard of a fix.

This is exactly what https://www.bountysource.com/ does. Any number of people can contribute to the bounty pool. When a developer submits a solution that gets merged into the project and the issue itself is closed, that developer collects the bounty.

For example, here's an issue with 11 backers: https://www.bountysource.com/#issues/27-split-pane-feature

...and here's a bounty over $1100 with 5 backers: https://www.bountysource.com/#issues/315019-add-a-tiling-win...

https://www.catincan.com does something similar except that developers choose what to put up for funding and only the main devs can seek funding on the platform. Think http://www.freedomsponsors.org is the original as far as open source crowdfunding.

The biggest issue it faces is adoption. Your funding amount needs to be in front of people in the issue tracker they are working in. If I have to go to a separate site to browse bounties I am now using two issue trackers essentially and most people are all about a slim toolchain.

I think this is probably why gittip works so well. Set it and forget it.

This seems like it could be a very good business model for developers to employ. Maybe someone could start a service based upon it. I could see it doing very well.

This is an elegant way to crowdfund open-source software. Nice idea.

this! features can be funded this way as well.

I do really love the features idea.

Being a developer myself, when I create a piece of code to do a specific thing and release it to the public it's not for monetary gain, but to help others than need it by using my source. However, if they wanted additional features added to it, you could have a pot, and once the feature is achieved the pot would be deposited to the developer.