Comment by leoc

It's a good start, but it's vulnerable to sticky fingers, patronage relationships and so on if the money becomes serious. For example, what if a project writes internal code instead of having a dependency on someone else's library? Do they get to keep the money which would have gone to an external contributor, creating an incentive to pull everything in-house? Or do they still have to push the same amount of money upstream? That creates the opposite incentive, a bag of free money which can be directed to third-party libraries which purely by coincidence happen to be staffed by members of the downstream project and/or their pals.

But as I said elsewhere, I'm not using this to dismiss the idea or assert that it can't improve things overall. The status quo seems to be pretty bad, so an alternative certainly doesn't have to be flawless to be better overall.