I'm sure you're free to clone Dave.
More seriously, there is no reason why other people couldn't join in. I posted the link to RT already, so the list of things to do is fairly available. If you're interested in getting bucks for fixing bugs, you will likely need to write a grant proposal to TPF (like Nicholas Clark did), and provided you have the credentials, it will likely be positively met. I presume the major thing holding this approach back is that there are not that many people with knowledge of C and Perl internals who are willing and available to work on Perl.