Reviving an old but by no means untopical discussion:

In GiftNet a developer says "If I get X dollars I will write and release under a FLOSS license code that does Y.". (A copyright owner just needs to release.)

The flip side to that is users who want a feature but don't have a developer yet. I can see people saying "I wish that program Z did Y and if someone makes it happen I will pay them x". If lots of other people are interested in getting that same feature in the program all those little $x would often add up to a sufficiently big $X to interest developers who might otherwise decide to take the evening off and enjoy life.

This would require a little bit of care- the developer can't force the program maintainers to accept the patch and yet there needs to be a way to check code quality.

But still, I can see myself pledging money for features or bugfixes on ooh, quite a few things!

Correction: The pay then release model is called Ransom - a terrible name IMO as it makes people who offer their services or copyrighted material under the scheme sound like big bad barons. There are undoubtedly BBB's around the place but labelling anyone who offers work in exchange for money as a badhat is ridiculous and not conducive to a healthy working environment.