I've been reading this thread, and I find it very interesting... I do have
some comments to make, although I'm afraid I'm going to sound like a spoiler.
I'll just note now that is NOT my intention; I only want to express some
concerns I have with this idea.

I think that, in general, contributors independently funding various bits
of development is a fine idea.  This is one of the things that free
software is about, IMO.

I think, however, that having The NetBSD Foundation, Inc. (TNFI) act
as a gatherer and redistributor of funds could be problematic.  I would
definitely want to have a lawyer carefully look over any plans for such
activity before TNFI jumped into doing something like that...  At the
very least, there would be some financial disclosure issues to deal with,
and it's not clear that TNFI could safely do such a thing without actually
making the receivers of the funds employees of TNFI (at which point the
payment of those employees becomes operational overhead of TNFI).  This
becomes especially true if the suggestion that TNFI take a 10% "cut" (to
buy disks for the ftp server, pay for the NetBSD.ORG domain name, etc.)
were implemented (really, the donation of resources to TNFI is a completely
orthogonal issue).

Also, the suggestion that this entire thing could be managed by a clever
piece of software with a www interface is, quite honestly, absurd :-)
Clever software can't deal with disputes (another reason to keep TNFI
out of the loop), etc.

What I would rather see is a bulletin board like thing, where two parties
could meet and independently arrange for the work to be done.

For example, a WWW page where consultants who take NetBSD-related work
could list their names, the work they're willing to do, their rates,
contact information, etc.  Another WWW page would allow people to post
"Want Ads", e.g. "I need a device driver for the Foozap Whatzitz, and
am willing to pay $xxx.yy for it." or "I am an ISP that uses NetBSD, and
I need a NetBSD expert to do system upgrades, install patches, and set up
source code control for our company."  TNFI would provide this service
to the NetBSD community, and include in the disclaimer that TNFI cannot
be held responsible for any results from using the service, yadda yadda
(again, have a lawyer look over these bits :-).

Jason R. Thorpe                                       thorpej@nas.nasa.gov
NASA Ames Research Center                            Home: +1 408 866 1912
NAS: M/S 258-6                                       Work: +1 650 604 0935
Moffett Field, CA 94035                             Pager: +1 415 428 6939