Thanks for the typo fix.

It's true, a client can do what you describe but then we won't keep them as clients for long ;-) I assume in the future we can add a mechanism to ensure payment in case of such a code "theft", and I admit this isn't handled now. That said, we're talking rather small tasks, not complete projects here, and what you describe is not something that doesn't happen in real life, i.e. contractors that don't get paid. I assume that a developer that works on this system, saves a lot of time on marketing and clients relation and even if 1/100 tasks he is not paid for, it still be worthwhile than the alternatives.

Isn't a parallel (and perhaps even larger?) market that of users of a system or library that might be willing to put a bounty on having a feature prioritized by the maintainer(s)?

With that in mind, could you use a variant of the same system to put a bounty on issues/tickets being resolved?

I don't know how to (in general) solve the problem of developers at large enterprises taking advantage of open source developers that are barely making ends meet. Nor the problem of developers being demanded to fix bugs or add features for the benefit of people who aren't paying anything for it -- but maybe this could be a start?

If I understand what you're saying, we made an open source offering based on our current model: http://codemill.io/for-open-source is that what you're after?

Plus, the repo owner can change the price at any time, from what I gather.

You're right. I didn't think of that. Need to make sure payout doesn't change while task is grabbed.