I was thinking more of a fix to the issue of "who the hell's maintaining this package our distro/service/whatever is based on" than a way to make money. The bigger projects (like the kernel) and vendors (MS, IBM/Red Hat, Canonical, Google, etc.) all have a vested interest in knowing the actual identity and basic personalities of people who maintain the important packages. If maintainers avail themselves for a weekend at a conference twice a year (or maybe even a lighter commitment like a few short meetings with a manager) they get some resources for their efforts. The flip side of this, of course, is that these organizations will prefer to include packages from maintainers who agree to this arrangement over those who don't.

Furthermore, these organizations are in a place to put experienced, trustworthy contributors on projects that need maintainers if need be. If Lasse had been able to go to, idk, the Linux Foundation and say, "Listen, I'm getting burnt out, got anyone?" and they said "Sure, we've got this contributor with an established record who would love to help maintain your project", none of this is happening right now.