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Bounties for Software Development?

Posted by Cliff on from the Ed-would-love-this-job-wouldn't-she-Spike? dept.

rho asks: "Reading the MacOS on x86 article from Sunday, specifically the part where Apple engineers were offered $16-25K bonuses for finishing a proof of concept and I got to thinking about applying this to outside contractors in other applications. Are there companies who offer 'bounties' for working code for back-burner or skunk-works projects? Ideally, a company would post a project with specs and any appropriate code/APIs/flowcharts, enveloped by an NDA, which could be accessed by bounty-coders. The bounty goes to the first coder (or team of coders) that produce working code that meets specifications. Could this be a source of income for good open-source programmers, or would coporate secrecy issues interfere with the operation?" An interesting thought...would something like this work? If not, why not?

4 of 7 comments (clear)

  1. www.opencodex.com by davidu · · Score: 2

    I think opencodex.com has a contest offering 50,000 for the first person/group to make an open source DivX codec.


    -Davidu

    --

    # Hack the planet, it's important.
  2. here are a few by po_boy · · Score: 4
    these sites have implemented pretty much what you're asking for:

    www.sourcexchange.com
    www.cosource.com
    The Free Software Bazaar

    Let me know if you see any more. This could soon be my only source of income.

  3. Problem by photozz · · Score: 3

    First problem I could see is. in the race to finish and get the "bounty", what would the acceptable bug limit be? I could see some fairly crapy, but barely functional code comming out of this.

    --


    Dirty Pirate Hooker
  4. Happens all the time... by human+bean · · Score: 3
    we just call it something else.

    In private business, we would call this a "request for proposal", essentially "name your own bounty". In the public model, various government agencies (ARPA? DARPA? Is "Defense" in or out of fashion?) make "technology transfer requests", usually with a not-to-exceed amount. They don't mind if you take the whole bounty, but they might want to deal with someone who would do it for less.

    The secrecy thing is handled in various ways, although the gov wants to know who knows their secrets (can't say I blame them), and private industry usually limits the distribution of the RFP to their friends.

    What I really want to see is a bounty on users. We can bring back the ears...

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    *whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"