Krzysztof-
Open-source is 20 years old. There are thousands of open-source projects. Some are successful, most are not. The development of open-source projects is on public record. There are mailing list archives, project web sites, history of CVS commits.
We don't have to guess or invent new ways of making open-source projects succesful.
Yes, we should just all keep doing whatever we have been doing for 20 years and be happy, and never try anything new. By the way, this whole Wikipedia idea is kind of crazy. People should just use CVS to edit the encyclopedia, why come up with something new when there is a perfectly good process in place already? Jesus Fucking Christ, what kind of crap attitude is this? "We don't have to guess or invent new ways"? No, we don't, but guessing and experimenting is the source of all innovation.
Much safer strategy is to analyze past, which is rich with examples,
Which you aren't even familiar with to the extent that you could name them. I can: CoSource, SourceExchange, the Free Software Bazaar. All these models have been examined and have failed for different reasons. CoSource failed for lack of VC, but had quite a lot of successful bounties completed at the time it closed down (check archive.org). SourceExchange was targeted at corporations, not individuals. The Free Software Bazaar was a static HTML website maintained by Axel Boldt, who lost interest at some point, but it was reasonably active and led to some completed projects.
The open code market idea is certainly not new, and it is one which is increasingly being explored, refined and adopted, and which will eventually inject the one thing into the open source process which is currently missing from it: money. I advise you to at least do some basic research and read, for example, Jordi Carrasco-Muñoz' paper "The Open-Code Market": http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_11/munoz/index.html
As well as "A history of markets for open source software": http://www.ms.lt/en/workingopenly/markets.html
I've never seen "rewarding with points" system applied in practice. Therefore it's unlikely that it's a good idea
"I've never seen a wiki applied in practice for building an encyclopedia. Therefore it's unlikely that it's a good idea." Look, please familiarize yourself with basic logic before you make bullshit arguments like that.
and it's certainly very risky to try things no-one has tried before.
The risk in minimal. If it alienates people, we scrap the system and don't do it again.
I don't know a single succesful open-source project that implements bounty system.
Your ignorance is unfortunate.
I've seen projects that flourish despite not having any external rewards systems in place (mono is a recent example, but there are of course plenty of them: GNOME and KDE projects, subversion, eclipse, gcc and I would consider wikimedia to be quite successful so far as it works well enough to support a massive undertaking as WikiPedia).
GNOME has a bounty system, and it works: http://www.gnome.org/bounties/ http://www.gnome.org/bounties/Winners.html
Mozilla has recently started bounties as well: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/bounty.html
It's safe to conclude that you don't need bounty system to have succesful project.
Well, you can set up whatever straw man you want and shoot it down, but that has never been the point of the proposal. Read it.
Erik