OSS Projects Offer Bounties For Features

jtowndot writes "The market for open source developers seems to be heating up. Asterisk, Gnome, Horde, and Mozilla all have bounties for desired features. Recently, Lime Wire updated its wish list to include bounties on open source development work! Similarly, i2p also released a bounty list. Is it time to consider quitting my day job to do open source development full time?"

Comments

you forgot mark shuttleworths...

[Simarilius]

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/bounty.html

Agreed

[mfh]

I did some work on Rent-A-Coder, and the pittance you can get paid doing OSS projects makes it more worthwhile to simply get a job like everyone else.

Re:A Few Questions About This

[hsmith]

IMO, Your best bet would be to incorporate (also serves to protect you in contractual agreement) and file your taxes for your income through that. LLC would allow you to limit your tax liability.

Along the same lines with MythTv

[Frying Ferret]

Along the same lines, a new company LxM Media http://lxmsuite.com/ has started up. They will be offering data services for MythTv http://mythtv.org/ as well as paying the Myth developers. From what I undstand, you pay $5/month, and you get bounty points to spend durring the month by putting them towards a specific feature or plugin. They will then pay the myth developer who implements the most popular function.

Re:Not going to quit mine

[joeljkp]

There's a proposal about integrating this type of feature into the Bugzilla bug tracking system. The idea is that there would be an extra field on each bug page that would allow anyone to bid on that bug. One would think that the ones bidded the highest would be fixed first (after being superseded by critical bugs and the like, of course).

$300+ for five year old mozilla bug zero interest

[Anonymous Coward]

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47838
Posted five years ago and still marked as "new" asking for the netscape 4 ability to paste a clipboard image straight into amozilla mail message. Lots of people pledged money but still zero interest.

Re:Not going to quit mine

[jalefkowit]

What is needed is a bounty system that users could pay into easily so the bounty could grow over time.

Ask and ye shall receive...

Re:This is the future of software development.

[Anonymous Coward]

This was thought of sooner. The idea has been around a long time. It has even been tried a number of times. Check out the Axel Boldt's Free Software Bazaar from 1999 http://web.archive.org/web/19990421055648/visar.cs ustan.edu/bazaar/bazaar.html, or Cosource from 1999 http://web.archive.org/web/20000302160316/www.coso urce.com/ or SourceXchange (no link available). The problem is that these attempts all failed for one reason or another.

Public Software Fund?

[Russ Nelson]

You mean like the Public Software Fund?
-russ

Public Software Fund!

[Russ Nelson]

This is what the Public Software Fund does. Write up a bounty and pledge some amount for it. If nobody will do it for that amount of money, talk your friends into pledging more money .... until somebody decides it's enough to write the code.
-russ

AROS does this too

[amigabill]

The AROS project has been doing bounties for a while now. http://www.aros.org/

Re:Not going to quit mine

[czarangelus]

I think what you're looking for is Kismet