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After The GNOME Bounties, It's Mozilla's Turn

Posted by timothy on from the cheap-labor dept.

MikeCapone writes "Slashdot had an article about the GNOME bounties a few days ago, but now, thanks to the Shuttleworth Foundation (created by Mark Shuttleworth, the guy who went into the ISS as a Soyuz cosmonaut a couple of years ago), the Mozilla project also has some monetary incentives. The budget for 2004 is USD$100,000."

7 of 290 comments (clear)

  1. Independent Contractors? by FortKnox · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Why not just hire contractors to do this if you have the cash? That way you have a better timeframe and knowledge of how the job is done, instead of waiting on a contest with no idea what will be done and what won't be done?

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    Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
    1. Re:Independent Contractors? by Saint+Stephen · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Dude, this is like so little cash. This is roughly the salary of one person for a year. In exchange for that, you get hundreds of worker bees.

    2. Re:Independent Contractors? by Stile+65 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      $100K for a year will hire maybe two contractors or one really good contractor. Contractors don't usually charge per task, either, but per hour - so you don't have any guarantee this way that the code will be done either.

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      I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
    3. Re:Independent Contractors? by Anthracks · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Unless it's a contractor who is already intimately familiar with the Mozilla codebase, you'd be paying for all the time learning it. Depending on the component you're hacking on, there's some hairy stuff in there :). You're paying for the work that got done, not that plus the time the contractor spent learning and messing up before coming up with a workable result.

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      Rock over London, Rock on Chicago. Wheaties: Breakfast of Champions.
  2. I am still waiting by mental_telepathy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    for a good tool for combining people who want to same software and are willing to pay. Like sourceforge and paypal rolled into one.
    My dream software - a decent open source fantasy sports dollar based draft solution. And I know I'm no the only one.

  3. Re:My Mozilla bounty by Ianoo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I don't think per-site patches are any way to fix a site with bad HTML and JavaScript. Mozilla follows the standards, adding a custom patch just for hotmail.com would be a bit silly. Before long we'd have a patch for every non-conformant site on the Internet.

  4. Re:My Mozilla bounty by Boing · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I don't think per-site patches are any way to fix a site with bad HTML and JavaScript

    No, the problem is not hotmail, it's that the "one browser window" idea that tabs were supposed to make possible is not possible with respect to javascript-created windows. That has nothing to do with standards conformance, since "tabs" in themselves are not part of any web standard. They're just an adaptation of the "window" model into a better organizational system.