Since JIRA is a source-available project, but not open-source, I don't think it makes sense to use bountysource.com or something similar.

In this day and age, every company has finite internal resources... why not make use of external resources as much as possible?  JIRA core developers I'm sure have their commercial and business-minded priorities, which may not exactly line up with customer-demand for specific features.

As a business, we need to keep moving.  We need to keep innovating and focus on our own core products.  We're not a JIRA company, we're a JIRA user, and we don't have the time to dig into JIRA source code and tackle making a significant change.

Let's offer development services to the community, at fair market value to address badly needed JIRA features, and JIRA Service Desk features, and any other projects that Atlassian Offers where customers can download the source code.

We would gladly pay $200, $500, $1000+, for a specific badly needed feature to be developed by the community that was vetted and incorporated into Atlassian mainline products and will be backed by their amazing support and development staff.  I'm sure this could be turned into a crowd funded development as well.  Or even a cloud based team development approach.  Maybe an entire new product line for Atlassian?  Imagine Atlassian CrowdFund... buy the platform and poof, now you have your own a crowd funding site.  But I digress.

Looking at the vote counts for many of these unaddressed open issues (mainly feature requests) in the tracker, with vote counts in the 100's or more or even 1000's or more, make me believe that it's definitely possible that 50 people watching an issue, who desperately need this new feature, would contribute $100 or more to see this issue completed, a $5000 or more community development bounty would surely attract some interest.