'Open Funding' For Driver Development

Doc Ruby writes "The TreoCentral community has announced a bounty for the first BlueTooth SDIO driver delivered for the Treo 600 (PalmOS 5). The thread shows the development of both the requirements of the quarry, and the contributions to the bounty. If this process works, is 'open funding' of development the next wave of the emerging online community? How will the 'traditional' vision/scope> requirements> features> >recode> retest> demo> cycle expand to include the user community in the financing?" Update: 06/16 19:43 GMT by T : Updated the bounty link to a server better able to handle it.

Comments

Rent-A-Coder

[TheRealMindChild]

While the goal is noble, the result wont be what you think. These free-for-alls to get things like drivers written for money, honestly, doesn't have much real ground for success. Think about it. 10 developers start throwing a whole mess of their own free time into trying to get driver x done for y money. 9 of them will NOT get the money. Depending on the work that they put into it, chances are they will come to the conclusion that it isn't worth the effort, because not only is there no guarentee of a payoff, you will never KNOW the odds you are up against to be the one to get paid in the first place. This certainly keeps people from taking on this model as a means of making a living, and most people doing it in spare time will find it a waste.

Re:Rent-A-Coder

[Not_Wiggins]

Even more to the point, you won't be driving *quality*, you'll be driving for early availability... which is almost the antithesis of quality; quality takes time, the very thing that's being cut.

No, I agree. I don't think this model will work, either. If I want to "win," then I need to develop ANY solution that works as quickly as possible, irrespective of how kludgey it might be. Maintainability? Extensibility? I'd be looking for as hard-coded as I can get!

OTOH, I doubt the driver will be any less stable than this company can produce itself internally. ;)

Re:Rent-A-Coder

[kfg]

Depending on the work that they put into it, chances are they will come to the conclusion that it isn't worth the effort, because not only is there no guarentee of a payoff, you will never KNOW the odds you are up against to be the one to get paid in the first place. This certainly keeps people from taking on this model as a means of making a living, and most people doing it in spare time will find it a waste.

This is exactly why professional auto racing failed to materialize at the dawn of the 20th century and hasn't been heard of since.

KFG

Re:Rent-A-Coder

[mean pun]

These bounties are really odd. Can you imagine if structures were built that way? First one to build me a new arena, to spec, gets $1 Million! We'd either have no buildings at all or a bunch of partially-built shells.

Bad example. Competitions are very common for building design (i.e. architecture). For example, a quick Google on `architecture competition' gives this one.

Re:Quality?

[MikeCapone]

Isn't the quality of linux software rooted in that there are no timetables to get things working?

I think that in the case of most bounties, the point is not to get something faster but to get something at all; it's to encourage coders to work on some areas that may be less fun or obvious.

Once the bounty is fufilled, nothing keeps people from taking their time and making it as good as possible.

Neat niche, but not the future.

[pavon]

The problem with this is that it doesn't provide a stable paycheck. If you look at many open source projects, they refuse to take donations simply because the money wouldn't help them (other than hosting). If you are a volenteer free software developer, getting a few bucks might be nice, but it won't enable you to spend anymore time writting free software than you already do. You have commitments to your job, schooling and family, and in most cases you don't have the flexibility to work less job hours (and get paid less) as you get more donations. If developers will not accept donations for what they are already doing, why would they go after a bounty? So no, I don't see it being the future of free software. The future will continue to be a mix of businesses that use and need to improve open source software, and volenteers.

Re:Neat niche, but not the future.

[dasmegabyte]

I'm sorry, but every little bit helps. If working on an OSS project brings in $100 a month in donations, you're far more likely to continue it when your wife starts getting cross with you, your kids are bugging to to go play, your grades start slipping, your fishing rod starts to get brittle from lack of use or your boss starts giving you the eye for coming in late every morning after staying up all night hacking a hardware abstraction layer.

That's a terrible idea

[ivan256]

That sounds like a great way to get several parallel development streams with zero colaboration going. This will either end with one working driver and several lesser quality broken drivers, or a whole bunch of half finished pieces of code. Either way you'll have end-user confusion.

There must be a way to get that money used in a way that creates an environment where programmers help each other.

Sounds like a great way to provide incentive

[Marxist Hacker 42]

This, to me, is what OSS has been missing- some form of incentive beyond the basic "I programmed it because it is neaty-keano". I may be a marxist, but I realize a basis of capitalism is rewarding people for hard work- or at least it's supposed to be.

A down side of this specific one is the time limit- what if it can't be done by the deadline, what happens to money contributed? My suggestion- take away the time limit, allow anybody to contribute money, and when the pile of money is big enough, somebody will release something and get the money. It's slightly better odds than the lottery, so sure enough somebody will come up with a driver (or any other piece of software) for the heck of it.

Open Source fueled by demand

[jeoin]

Bidding for software works. This would allow programmers to do the shopping for the bidders based on the programmers skill set. The system could be written into the license so that once the job is performed the code is open for general use.

This is great and ridiculous

[danharan]

How will the 'traditional' vision/scope> requirements> features> >recode> retest> demo> cycle expand to include the user community in the financing?

Other people have suggested solutions that would include this before: The open code market was mentionned on slashdot a while back, and similar ideas were posted here as early as '99.

But NO... these people will use a bounty, leading to perhaps many people competing for a puny amount of cash -duplication, anyone? And who wants to bet we'll end up with horribly unmaintainable spaghetti code everyone would rather re-write from scratch than reverse engineer because it lacks comments? Haven't we all kvetched about the horrible code that was shipped out to meet deadline with no regards to readability? A bounty would only make this worse.

Despite the nay-sayers...

[Dagny Taggert]

...I agree with the poster who mentioned the competition aspect of this. Many, many people will code for money, but the really good ones code to not only put food on the table, but know that they can be or are the best at what they do.

Wrong Motivation

[DCBoland]

A developer rushing out code to win money isn't likely to test it thoroughly, and networking drivers are something that need to be reliable. Whilst it's a great way to get development started, this offer doesn't stipulate that the driver be Open Source, which IMO is vital for such an offer to be worthwhile. When the bugs almost gauranteed by rushed development become apparent, the winner isn't obliged to fix them... We don't need more rushed proprietary drivers, I'd like to see some more Open Source programming contests...

Re:Quality?

[scorp1us]

Getting the model down, and down right is 90% of the effort. After that hackers like me who fix bugs in other people's code will take it from there.

I contribute dozens of lines a code a day to several projects, but I start very few of my own. Those get contributions from others too...

But there is a lot to having just a working model, even if it is limted. Charting the path is hard, branching out from it is easy.