The developer audience is small and targeted. Kickstarter woos the masses. I doubt GitHub would make much money off this idea. The bigger problem is who gets the money from backers. Projects can have multiple contributors, projects can also be forked. There is no way this system could fairly pay the right contributors without massive complexity and pissing people off.
I don't see the problem. The money goes to the owner of the repo to distribute as they see fit.
If you contribute code to an OS project, and then someone makes money from that OS project, do you feel pissed off that you didn't get a cut of that money?
If you trust people to build you free stuff, why do you suddenly not trust them to get paid for it?
May I plug https://www.gittip.com/ up here, too? Gittip lets you pay money to developers on GitHub. It's only a month old. Three weeks ago we moved $30, and last week we moved $380.
'the owner of the repo to distribute as they see fit.' - that type of system will piss people off no matter how much you rationalize it.
'If you contribute code to an OS project, and then someone makes money from that OS project, do you feel pissed off that you didn't get a cut of that money?' - like a lot of money? and something you put a lot of code into? then yea. have you had an open source project that others have taken and reaped hundreds of thousands of dollars off of? I have, it sucks.
'If you trust people to build you free stuff, why do you suddenly not trust them to get paid for it?' - because ideal human behavior is different from real human behavior.
