Very interesting question.

One challenge: all of the tokens currently worth anything promise future revenue for holders. To date, all of the successful projects have some money entering the system (or a clear mechanism promising to). Thus tokens’ value comes from speculation on this stream of future earnings, like dividends on a stock.

It’s not clear how this model fits onto Linux.

Maybe the closest is Tezos, where bounties are paid to open-source developers that can successfully get new code merged. It’s a very interesting question.