I'm new to the wider development field so I'm pretty ignorant to the dynamics of how things work right now or what it takes to maintain an open source project;

I'm new to the wider development field so I'm pretty ignorant to the dynamics of how things work right now or what it takes to maintain an open source project; how come a bounty system isn't more prevalent? I know bountysource exists, but I rarely see it brought up. Wouldn't work for all packages or projects, but for the ones with big corporate use that are still being developed, it seems like a straight forward way to have a project be more self sustaining vs hoping ppl decide to donate. Seems like a decent first step towards a wider system that could track what packages you use, or that you manually list, with each package or project having a monthly "sustainability goal" set by the maintainer. So that critical packages used by everyone can have more visibility and a more dynamic support system with lower barrier between the maintainer and the wider community. I've always felt that the "subscription" model of things like patreon or similar is too much of a mental commitment for most ppl. Besides, my needs change month to month, and so would what I want to support. Having wider "sustainability" goals with an easy way to donate to them would encourage me to efficiently support the projects I find most useful or inspiring to me. Basically having the data and seeing what projects that are important to me and are currently short funded, and also having an easy system to directly support them without long term commitments. It's that visibility of the current state of different foss projects that I feel needs to be addressed, before any creative solutions on monetization can really be layered on top.