I maintain a lot of open source projects, but IMO this is not the right approach. I think the [anecdote from @jbk](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29524103) about ffmpeg illustrates that.

I also don't think the problem it solves gives the greatest benefit for the amount of work required. I think making it easier for companies to pay open source contributors is the right approach. For any company that builds software, finding and paying the open source projects they use is a massive amount of work and there's nothing that helps with that. If there was much less friction to paying maintainers, more companies would do it.

I would love to see a tool that, given a pool of money, will collect dependencies from projects in any language (extensible), find the authors (git commit history, etc.), find where they accept contributions (extensible), and pay them, based on both computed and hand crafted weights.