I've always thought that there should be a "Patreon" [1] for open source. Companies would commit to paying monthly to an author in exchange for some sort of reward system like getting the bugs they prioritize fixed.

I once worked for a large Fortune 500 that had several well-known programmers who's entire job was to be core-contributors to a popular ruby web framework. They were well paid and had very little oversight.

But given the popularity of this framework, it always seemed a little weird to me to have a single company funding the development. It's also a little risky for the community at large because corporate strategy shifts and an open-source project that was important yesterday may not be important today.

(cf. Evan Phoenix / Rubinius / EY - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubinius, Charles Nutter / JRuby / Sun - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JRuby and countless others.)

It seems to me that, in theory, we ought to have a platform for monthly payments to open source developers that maintain projects we use in production.

[1] https://www.patreon.com/