Ask HN: Why not a GEO dispersed startup?

This is some kind a follow up to this - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1565375

Why not to model a startup as a hybrid of an open source project (say, Cassandra) and some team-building and a payment model form a soccer team?

Isn't co-called 'sponsored' projects works exactly this way?

There are some kind of healthy competition and rotation among contributors. You can pay a premiums for a milestone achievement, or for closing a ticket and the like.

If there are thousands of a successful GEO dispersed OSS projects (linux kernel, freebsd, nginx, sqlite, git, to name a few) why not adapt this model as a basis for a startup?