I am not claiming the "kickstarter" model is the final solution, rather an attempt at starting the discussion / process of iterating towards the correct one. I

I am not claiming the "kickstarter" model is the final solution, rather an attempt at starting the discussion / process of iterating towards the correct one. If you need a guarantee for a feature / bug being handled within a timeframe you can do multiple things depending on criticality of the FOSS - develop / patch it yourself. and contribute or fork the project and maintain internally. - purchase paid support (see RedHat, SpringSource, MySQL) - have your employees contribute to the FOSS as part of their normal duties effectively building your own expertise - other Something like BountySource existing is a proof there is a need for other models to "motivate" community into putting more effort into FOSS. What I am advocating is to attempt implementing "value based pricing". Right now a lot of projects are started by someone in their "spare time" and being abandoned because there is no easy way to reward the author. Your points are valid but these are exactly of the type that should be solved by market (money). Features hold different value for different users. In the low end we just live with bugs / missing functionality and in the high end you see $200/h consulting gigs. (per downvotes: let's keep this a discussion board where we agree / disagree by words rather than like / dislike).