I think it is a nice idea to finance the development via Kickstarter. I think this could become much more common for common big open source projects, i.e. some particular interesting missing feature or redesign which might need anyway some professional designer or so - financed by the community. And if I am interested in the particular feature, I am also very open to spend a bit money there. Also, by doing separate c…
Another thought, going even further: I would also very happy to work on many other open source projects if I would be paid for. Maybe there could be an open platform similar to Kickstarter but maybe the users itself could suggest features and obligatory say how much money they would spend. And developers would say on what things they would want to work on. In the end, probably the project maintainers would then decid…
As a backer you can put cash bounties on Github issues (other trackers to come) and when a project committer accepts a pull request for that issue, the developer gets paid.
On the flip side, we're about to launch Fundraisers, which is very similar to the Kickstarter model: create a project spec and get it funded. We're building specifically for open source, rather than a generic platform.
We'd love to hear your thoughts! (#bountysource on freenode)