In my opinion, most of this will turn into a way to game the system. Like another comment said, this is Microsoft's "Summer Of Code".
For a successful open source funding story, take a look at Mkdocs-Material, which recently crossed $10k/mo:
- The frontend ecosystem is one of the worst ecosystems for OSS funding, despite its enormous size
- Python, C#, C/C++ communities seem very much okay paying for licenses to packages and seem to have a better uptick in funding OSS. I've seen alot of Python success stories in particular
- If you aren't in a mainstream language either your community funds you very closely or its not funded at all, there seems to be little middle ground. Wish I could think of two direct comparative examples but I think looking at ocaml vs haskell is telling (idk if their userbase is similar in size or not, I am almost certain ocaml is bigger but not sure by how much)
Regardless, its still only the top 1-2% of projects, regardless of ecosystem, that get most of the funding. The sad reality is often its OSS maintainers paying other OSS maintainers most of the time.
https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/insiders/#whats-... includes subtitles and icons as paywall features.
Open Core is a plague on Open Source.