The biggest problem is that these things only really address user visible software. The modern tech stack is as deep as it is wide and even as a developer I often have little knowledge of who's maintaining things more than one level down from me.
Say I publish an awesome and useful library but suck at UI stuff, the person that comes along and incorporates my library in a slick front end would probably get the donations.
> Say I publish an awesome and useful library but suck at UI stuff, the person that comes along and incorporates my library in a slick front end would probably get the donations.
Yep. One of my OSS projects has been installed 27 million times to date (and that metric doesn't track WordPress, which uses it), but it's unlikely to yield any sort of support contracts or revenue.
I do get contacted to resolve support issues, but it's almost always solved by "Contact your host and tell them to make the following configuration change, because nothing I can devise will be secure without those changes".
Say I publish an awesome and useful library but suck at UI stuff, the person that comes along and incorporates my library in a slick front end would probably get the donations.