Aaron Jorbin posted an update with things he did in WordPress in July. 

During the month of July, I contributed to 19 tickets on trac, made 8 commits to core, received 28 props, reviewed 3 make/core posts, updated some documentation for committers, mentored 1 release of WordPress and worked approximately 31 hours on WordPress, of which my sponsors paid for almost 18 hours and I donated the rest.

I haven’t contributed to WordPress in many years, but in the past I loved the model of being sponsored and having time to just try and make it better. 

Having Aaron share how time is broken down, what he did, and who is sponsoring his efforts is amazing. I love it. I’m not sure if this can work for too many other people, but it’s a model I wish I saw more of in the open source space, where amazing people are sponsored to continue to make such projects better.