Bounties for Software Development?

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?

Comments

here are a few

[po_boy]

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.