I think the answer is yes, but with a huge caveat: incentives must be build around the social norms that made open source successful in the first place. Incentives built on financial norms would be disastrous and act as strong disincentives instead. Humans are weird, and we act differently when operating under financial norms than we do under social norms. Dan Ariely explains this quite nicely in a lot of his talks, you should google it if you haven't seen it.

This is why I'm really skeptical of things like gittip or other "we'll pay you pennies to spend hours of your life building open source projects" approaches.

I much more excited by the cultural shift that seems to be happening around "my github account is my resume". It's not just a "write open source as resume padding to get a better job" thing, it's an increase in the amount of social capital resulting from contribution to open source. Basically if people find out I contribute to a "good" open source project more people care and the people who care, care more than they used to.

I think this is an excellent incentive scheme. A popular open source project cannot generate enough revenue to pay me what my contribution is worth so it's impossible for them to incentivize me with money. But if my reputation is increased because my contribution is recognized and my peers think more of me, my ideas are more easily heard and my financial career path opportunities are expanded because of that reputation then I am highly motivated to contribute.

I think there's a big place for the patronage/sponsorship model as well (and the incentives to be a patron are quite similar), especially for getting the necessary but boring/less sexy things done. It can also push back, in one way, against the problem of reputation based incentives undervaluing boring but high-value work.