I think martinfick offered great metaphor...

Possibly, in some cases... But, there's also the possibility that the proprietary software company just doesn't want to fix your particular issue for whatever reason (they don't see it as a bug, or are worried fixing it might break compatability, or whatever)... In that case, you're completely out of luck, unless you can find someone good with a disassembler and hacking assembly code these days (and willing to break the law to do so, since that's probably illegal)... With open source, at least you have the option to go elsewhere for your fix, if you should deem it important enough to do so...

As for your other comment about the bug bounty, I think that's a great idea... It'd be cool to see a little "Donate towards getting this bug fixed!" button on every open bug tracking entry... I don't know how many would do it, but I suspect the popular ones would get quite a few people throwing a few bucks at it... Of course, it might also encourage less scrupulous programmers from adding in bugs deliberately only to claim the bounties on them later... But, hopefully that'd be seen through fairly quickly, especially in an open source project... More likely, I suspect it would encourage new contributors to join in trying to fix the popular bugs, which can only really be a good thing...