I know there are ways of doing this today, but if it's not super frictionless and integrated into the platform, it's less likely to happen
https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/23/18637344/github-sponsors-...
I wonder if that will create some perverse incentives? Will people be as willing to contribute significantly to projects if they know the maintainer is making $1000s and they're getting nothing. Or will they instead rather try to start their own competing project in hopes of capturing some of that revenue.
I think managing the direction and budgets of open source projects that have many contributors in a fair, effective way is a really interesting problem. There are some blockchain DAO projects where this is handled by voting. Each participant's vote could be weighted by different things - contribution activity, seniority within the project, more traditional board/council structure, whatever. The voting results can also be automatically executed.
Or you could pre-determine and automate how funds will be paid out to contributors - ie. bounties for new features/fixing bugs
Who decides where the funds get spent, how to automate some of it etc
Donating money is always incredibly tricky if you work at a larger company, especially if you get nothing in return. I can a buy a license or support contract easily, with a bit more effort I could probably sponsor a local FOSS meetup/event. But just giving someone $50 as a thanks for writing that software we rely on, is basically impossible unless I just pay it out of pocket.