Sorry if this comment comes off as naive; about 2002 I realized I didn't have the necessary set of personality traits to survive as a sole proprietor in the ope

Sorry if this comment comes off as naive; about 2002 I realized I didn't have the necessary set of personality traits to survive as a sole proprietor in the open-source field, so I earn my money elsewhere now (technical translation). And so I'm only peripherally aware of the software industry, so to speak. But here and there I keep seeing the notion of a bounty pop up, whereby people can sponsor specific changes. These frameworks don't seem to last long, though. And it's fairly obvious why: if I have a business need for a specific change to the point that I can afford a bounty, then I also need a non-flaky pledge from a developer to make the change in a timely manner and follow through with testing and so forth. It seems to me that we have a mismatch of scale. A small change is worth a week of my time if I really want polka dots on my music player. It's fun and I take time from the paying work just because I get a charge out of it, and maybe the community appreciates it. The positive charge I get from that improves my life -- perhaps makes me happy and motivated enough to be more efficient with the paying work. But I can't make a living doing other people's small changes one after the other. I don't care about their changes, only their money -- and they can't afford a week of my time to make me care enough about it. So what you would really need would be to find all the people interested in a given change, and they would all pay for it, and in sum, it might be worthwhile. Right? But that won't work, either -- if I want polka dots on my music player, I might chip in ten bucks, say. If I see that it's already got $75 x 8 x 5 = $3000 dollars pledge, I'm going to say, what? Three thousand bucks for polka dots? Problem two: I don't actually know it's going to take a week, do I? If it takes two, I'm working myself into a hole. What if 300 people have already pledged their ten bucks and I flake out because it really didn't seem that good an idea afterwards? And finally, problem three: how long will it take for 300 people to think they want polka dots? The need will have passed by the time it can gain momentum. So what? Do I work on spec and hope 300 people will pay me? That won't work -- I either give it back to the community, so there's no motivation to pay me, or I withhold my change until paid enough, and it's not open source any more. (By which I mean, it violates the spirit of open source -- the mood is gone, to my mind.) It could be that when all six billion of us are online and more of us make more than a dollar a day, this kind of scale problem will melt away. But until then, paradoxical as it sounds, maybe the world just isn't big enough for this stuff. It could also be that a magical change in technology will make it way cheaper to make changes (some hand-wavy high-semantics AI-supported coding system -- be honest, you want to write one, too). That would also alleviate the scale mismatch. But until then, I think these efforts are doomed to failure. Unless somebody proves me wrong -- but so far, I don't see it happening.