> I've often dreamed of a system where normal users, give money as a promotion for a certain issue to be fixed or even created, if the user wants feature X then he should be able to give an incentive towards that feature to be added into the software that they use, developers do bounties instead, the user doesn't have to give much only a dollar, but if many users want feature X, then the money/donations pool creating higher incentives until the task itself matches the level of work to be performed to achieve it until merged.

Have a bot on GitHub that nags people about the pool of committed money towards each feature, to show that they care about it - with the money being placed into an escrow and being released once the feature is implemented and merged, or until a date is reached with no merge and it's given back to everyone / or when the request is closed with no changes. Ofc no idea how you'd validate each individual issue well enough to prevent someone from misusing it, but one could feasibly create such a system, even if it'd probably get a lot of opposition from everyone.

All we need to do is create Kalshi contracts! Users bet that a fix won't be created for Issue 123 by date XYZ, developers take the other side of the contract and then do the best kind of insider trading: changing the facts on the ground. We did it!

You know what would be nice? For these billionaires to start sponsoring people instead of sitting on the obscene heaps of money they have—a patronage system. Everyone wins.

Are there any projects that have achieved anything close to this? I'm not against it in principle, but it seems like it ends up incurring issues from tiptoeing around wanting all the benefits of an incorporated business with employees or at least contractors without the stigma(?) of getting all official and putting someone in the hot seat of responsibility. Off the top of my head:

- A business has some intrinsic motivation however minuscule to fix unsexy issues like security problems or problems that aren't as visible to customers so they don't get hacked and sued and go under; in a pay-what-you-want bounty scheme all of your users are playing chicken to not be the one to put up the money for the fix. Instead they'll wait until it becomes a problem and fix it in their own branch; no reason to bother upstreaming it until someone comes forward putting up the money.

- IMO there's no way to measure cuts for something like this that can't be gamed. If you close out the bountied issue, but you make use of a bunch of utility code I contributed last week, who gets it? Or if the code I contributed is mostly a mechanical refactor of some very complex code someone else wrote? Do we divvy it up by lines of code, number of commits, etc, and that's just for the squint-and-it's-qualifiable metrics for engineers. No idea how you'd measure a cut for project managers. Someone also may be the steward of the repository and handle administrative work but not do a whole lot of feature-fixing, what cut do they get? Instead of juggling KPIs you can just pay all these people for their common contribution - time - and then you're back at something that businesses do really well.

- For any bounty system to work you need somewhere to track the bounties and hold money in escrow for payouts. Those services exist, they cost money to run, and they are going to take a cut. I'd assume they'd also invest and grow that money while they have it unless that's illegal for some reason I'm not aware of. An incorporated business keeps its bounties in the issue tracker, and its money in an account that accumulates interest that can go toward further development on the actual product instead of third-party support services. Crypto is a no-go here because that limits your contributor pool to exclusively crypto perverts, otherwise normal people have to speculate on it and convert it to normal useful money for a fee.

- I've worked at a place where the devs got to work on whatever they wanted. Required to, really, because there was very little interest or hands-on management from the owner in the direction of the product as long as sales were stable. We had a great time and got paid and we all learned a lot on company time and last I checked they are no longer in business.

- Timelines are a big factor too. If some open-source software I'm using is missing a big feature I'd like (and if post-2024, it's too substantial to just make a copy and have Copilot customize it for my use) I'm still not going to kick in the first $10 in the hopes that somebody someday builds that feature for me. I'm going to be dead or not using the software by then. If I thought the feature I wanted was worth $10,000 and I had $10,000 to kick towards it in the hopes that somebody somewhere would decide to build it, I would instead hire somebody on contract terms to do the work with a greater guarantee of results and some recourse if they screw me.

Those normal users are better off instead purchasing software. Then they will be listened to by developers if they report a bug or suggest a feature. Because they represent an incredibly valuable user segment: paying customers.