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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?"
I mean, someone might write code for the requested feature that works, kinda, but maybe not a good implementation or is uncommented obfuscated spaghetti code or something. How do they assertain whether or not the implementation should get the entire bounty or a portion?
Is outsourceing it's bounties to India then, heh. Just because me and you can't afford to live off of these bounties doesn't mean someone somewhere else couldn't.
click me
one of the bounties is $1000, not $100. That makes $1300 total - a little better than fast food, don't you think?
In a way consumers have always been able to vote on features in a natural selection sort of way (lousy software dies off, the best stuff gets a year or letters next to the title). But this allows much more direct feedback while still allowing the project leaders to control what direction the software is developed in.
Additionally, it will perhaps put egos in check to see what users want and to be able to say you're giving them what they pay for, instead of getting upset when they feel they have a legitimate gripe about bugs in a free product and you feel they should be thankful for what they've got already (video game emulation community?)
And on top of that maybe it would allow even stronger claims to be made if a company violates your licence -- those users aren't paying for features to be appropriated by someone who's going to steal work and close the source.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
Professional? I figured this was aiming to get some work out of high school or college students who could use it as a way to earn cash on the side and possibly credit.
Yeah I would definitely throw into the "kitty" for a feature. I even pay for shareware if it is worthwhile. Winzip was a perfect example for a long time until XP had a built in utility for unzipping. I would definitely pay for a feature such as a linux app that scans for unencrypted wireless or a wireless with a key you have on a list and automatically connect when in range. Great for roaming and would be awesome if every time you drove through a free hotspot it could sync email.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
What if I work on a feature with the expectation of getting the bounty, only to find it claimed before I'm done?
I'm assuming this is an attempt to speed development of some features, nothing more
New front-end that allows control of LimeWire via a web browser [...] And for only 500 bucks?
Actually, that sounds like one of the more reasonable requests. I could probably whip out a web frontend over the weekend. The real issue is the lack of info. What criteria have to be met in order to accomplish the goal? Would I end up wasting about 30 hours of my time to build a GUI, only to be told I won't be paid because it's missing sub-feature X? They need to have something more concrete than "Build a web frontend".
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I'm not a CS grad, nor do I have any programming knowledge at all, but as a college graduate with no job, seeing this article raises a few questions for me: (I'm in a different field but with a similar predicament)
(1) How do the taxes on these "bounties" work out? Are you considered an independent contractor with your own 1199, or do payroll taxes kick in?
(2) Can CS grads who can't find jobs now use open source projects as a basis of experience, and can they not put the experience on their resume? Before, saying "I helped program XYZ chunk of Firefox" didn't really seem to mean too much on a resume, since there was no one over there you could ask to verify this. But now, if someone over there is willing to pay you cash, is there now a paper trail involved? i.e.: Can you now put down ABC's name on your resume as a reference if his payroll office paid you to build that XYZ chunk of Firefox? If you now could, this option could definitely help a lot of the unemployed CS people gain valuable experience.
Granted, I may not know what I'm talking about, but I'm just wondering. A lot.
This is probably the smartest thing I've heard all day. Not only would bounties be bigger, but users would have an indirect say in what features got implemented. (i.e. - More users want feature X than Y, the bounty for X grows more rapidly than Y, X gets more man-hours of coding than Y and is implemented sooner.)
This sig rocks the casbah.
That is a really, really good idea. For a very popular project like Firefox, it could actually make it viable for someone to work on it full time.
I have found it is mostly the time aspect. They all hear the hourly rate, but when they hear the projected time, then they balk.
"Sure i'll pay you $50/hr. 100 hours?!?!? I can just keep doing it in excel for that..."
Exactly. OSS is the "WalMart" of the software world. Those always low prices have to come out of someone's hide. Guess who?
What is needed is a bounty system that users could pay into easily so the bounty could grow over time.
Users love this idea, but FLOSS developers generally hate it. I develop my project for fun in my spare time; I don't want users dictating what I must do with my project. Don't get me wrong; I love getting ideas from users, and more often than not, I implement them. I like my hobby, I don't want it to be a job.
Anyway, there was a huge thread on kde-devel on this very topic a few weeks ago, in case you want more dev perspectives on the matter.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
This really is one of the most interesting things I've seen developed on the 'net in a long, long time.
It has, of course, heaps of utility beyond just funding development of pet projects...
-- -pjk Perry Kundert perry@kundert.ca http://kundert.2y.net
The bounty system isn't in place yet, but I'm personally looking forward to it. It'll let me make a little extra money on projects I already invest a lot of my time in, as well as hopefully bring in more help for those things I won't have time/desire to implement myself.
My only concern is how this third-party company will run the bounties, and what will happen if a feature is rejected upstream (say, someone sends me a crappy upgrade to mythweb, which I've been cracking down on lately). Either they end up maintaining their own branch, and people get credit for crappy patches that developers have to fix on their own time, or the user-request bounty system will break down if devs will only accept features that they like. But I have hope -- they're working very closely with the core development team to make sure that everything is ok.
Do you really need reason for beer? Wingman Brewers
Perhaps your bid gets spread out with a portion being divided proportionally over the critical bugs based on their severity and the rest being applied to the bug of your choice.
This would keep the severe problems at a higher dollar value than all but the most popular of feature requests...
Justin Dubs
Wouldn't we then be rewarding the wrong behavior, e.g. More bugs = more $$
Seems like a perpetual bug creating system to me.
I might understand bounties for particularily tough programming challenges, but not for everyday bugs.
Besides, once a price is set for open source coding, who's going to do it for free anymore?
Paying money for everyday OS coding is switching the carrot, which has dire consequences.
Open source works because the people who code do so, because the want to. Put a price tag on that and it does weird things to peoples brains. Basically, it changes the game.
There was a psyc study about this kind of thing I think it was paying for grades or something, and the students lost interest once they figured out that it wasn't worth their while monetarily-wise and they stopped caring.
When I volunteer for something, often times I find myself working harder and with more dedication than at work. I think the same thing happens with OS.
Hey but it sounds like an awesome idea to kill off open source and it's ideals once and for all!
Bad idea, all around.
cat sig >
There's a lot of high quality OSS out there getting developed and maintained without analysis and design documents. That would seem to be an "existance proof" that such documentation is unnecessary.