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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
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.
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
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 >