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'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.
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.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
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.
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
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.
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.