I think this model would work better if he wanted to take time off to start up and develop a new OSS project. I can see a lot of people donating to get 'Some really cool project' built. But I doubt that faster bug fixes and improved documentation in open source reporting software is worth 60$ to too many people if you take away the feel good factor of donating to open source
On the other hand, i certainly know of businesses using open source projects that would happily pay someone external to fix a bug or add a feature to a given project. Why they wouldn't just assign one of their own developers is a mystery, but that's the way it is.
There are plenty of businesses that do pay people to work on various open source projects. Google, Apple, IBM, possibly even Microsoft.