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OSS Projects Offer Bounties For Features

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the headhunting-with-a-keyboard dept.

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?"

3 of 261 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Not going to quit mine by Vorondil28 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.)

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    This sig rocks the casbah.
  2. Check out http://fundable.org ... by pjkundert · · Score: 4, Interesting
    ...it's a mechanism for organizing "all or nothing" funding for any venture (including funding of Open Source development projects: http://fundable.org

    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...

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    -- -pjk Perry Kundert perry@kundert.ca http://kundert.2y.net
  3. Re:Not going to quit mine by zifferent · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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    cat sig > /dev/null