Is it as straightforward as placing a bet? No. But there are still many more/better ways to do it than, say, going long or short the outcome of an election. Prediction markets shine in contexts like elections because there aren't other good skin-in-the-game metrics. But OSS has things like developer activity, user adoption, $ donations, etc.
Discussion
Investing your own time in an open-source project is not very different from voting in an election and promoting your candidate and so on. Both kinds of actions give us no clue to whether the project or candidate is going to be successful or not.