The biggest oppurtunity would be to allow assigning money for tasks and solutions. Like there are so many really good projects with a lot of open issues and good ideas on things to improve a library/framework/project. The ability to say, hey, i am the project owner and i would love to add this cool feature to my library which is complicated, you can donate for this feature, like crowdfunding for software.
Or the other case. I have created many pull requests in the past which had been only a few lines to fix an existing bug but they did never merge it. Sometimes i received notifications for years from other people asking why it is not meged and they had to fork (and maintain) it to fix this bug. Just saying here are 50$ if you merge it would be a life-saver. No more maintaining a fork just to fix a bug which is not a priority of the owner who prefers adding more and more features.
My point is open source does not need to be free work from the maintainer. A platform like github could change the game by allowing people to get a small payment for what they are doing. But not like their actual plan by just giving them money, i want to connect it to a "problem" to solve (resolve issue, add feature, merge pr, ...)
Or the other case. I have created many pull requests in the past which had been only a few lines to fix an existing bug but they did never merge it. Sometimes i received notifications for years from other people asking why it is not meged and they had to fork (and maintain) it to fix this bug. Just saying here are 50$ if you merge it would be a life-saver. No more maintaining a fork just to fix a bug which is not a priority of the owner who prefers adding more and more features.
My point is open source does not need to be free work from the maintainer. A platform like github could change the game by allowing people to get a small payment for what they are doing. But not like their actual plan by just giving them money, i want to connect it to a "problem" to solve (resolve issue, add feature, merge pr, ...)