I do like the idea.  I do see some problems.

>Well, I'd assume that we'd want some kind of 'dibs', or at the very least,
>notification that work is in progress.

There would need to be more than this for someone like me to step up and
take a job.  I have summers "free" and usually need to get some income
during that time to help me through.

I need more than just 'dibs' and I'd most likely need more money than
what was available in a "I'll give $100 for a driver."  It partly depends
on how much time it takes to get a job done, but $100 for a driver would
be very low pay to do driver from scratch.  Also, there has to be some
up front money for purchasing hardware.

Some funding already happens in the NetBSD project.  It hasn't been as
formalized as this proposal we are discussing.  For example, I believe
that SMP is already funded.  I do know that sysinst was funded.  The
fundinging got it to an initial state where it was included into the
tree and then volunteers continued the development.

Just to throw some numbers up ... let us assume I want to use my summer
to work on NetBSD and have it funded.  I can easily get an employer to
pay me $35/hr for Web CGI programming.  But for NetBSD, lets say that
I'll accept $25 because it is a project on which I love to work.  21
days per month, 8 hours per day ==> $4200 per month.  

So the amount of money needed to attract contract programmers who love
to work on NetBSD is more than the "I'll give $100...".  And $25/hr is
very low pay for good contract programmers.

-- 
Phil Nelson                    NetBSD: http://www.netbsd.org
e-mail: phil@cs.wwu.edu        !gifs: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html
http://www.cs.wwu.edu/~phil