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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?"
"We got the Feature. He's holed up over on the South side of the partition. Better bring your compiler."
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
http://www.markshuttleworth.com/bounty.html
$150 buys about 3hrs of my time, most of those projects posted look to take much longer than that.
At these bounty rates you would be starving. As a professional doing open source work for free they are almost an insult: Do people really rate our work that low?
The trick isn't what language you know, it is knowing the languages you do know well, and knowing the theory. You can make as much programming in VB as you can in C++, as long as you are worthwhile (and even if you're not but know someone who can land you a cushy job)
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
Hmmm...at "http://www.i2p.net/bounties" there are $450 of bounties...and $150 of it is for a "Content Distribution Network"
I wouldn't quit your day job yet.
In some cases at least, it seems as if these bounties are used to deal with the relative lack-of-glamour inherent in implementing some features in pieces of OSS. For the most part, its the cool hacks and features that people need individually that grab attention and get worked on. Bounties seem to redress that balance of developer attention towards less glamourous but key pieces of functionality & improvements which aren't imminently required. (although for the most part, it seems like a different class of hackers are attracted to the bounties within projects)
Of course, putting money into OSS through these kind of means is a great use, since similar amounts spent on commercial products has a minimal/neglible effect on their development. Its also a great way for those people who cant code to contribute to the software they use, and get features they'd like to see implemented.
Business Voyeur
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.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
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.
Anyone who intends to count on the bounty opportunities as a source of income should make sure that there is a firm understanding as to what is required to earn the bounty (if not requesting a contract of some kind). I can certainly see folks plowing a lot of effort into this only to have the people offering the bounty say "that's not what I want...no bounty for you".
If there is one overriding reason that I hate MS Office, it is that it feels like the application was developed by a thousand independent programmers. Consistency between and within Office applications is very poor. Each feature seems to have its own UI logic, limitations, behaviors.
A bounty program is great. But if it creates a thousand independent bolt-on features, it will suck. Perhaps some high-level architect in each project can create some stub classes or documentation that define exactly what the bounty-earning feature must do and how it should conform to a set of UI guidelines.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
One thing I've noticed about free software that differs vastly from the projects I've worked on in the commercial world is that with free software there is usually a push to do something right, even if it means waiting a while for a feature. With the bounties I've seen thus far, the mentality seems to be the commercial "do it as quickly as possible" idea. Granted, a lot of the bounties are for stuff no one really wants to do, so something is probably better than nothing, but it might also be nice to have rewards for those who do things well.
Tasks like removing dead code, simplifying existing code, etc are tasks that the commercial world seldom does with its software ("if it ain't broke...") but it's something that keeps open source code maintainable. It might be a good idea to set up some of these bounties in terms of rewards, such that projects could once a year give something to people who not only added features to a project, but who improved the quality of a project. The bounties going out now are great, but expanding them to support quality and innovation would be really, really great.
JAMWiki Java-based Wiki engine
This is a sign of what supporters of Open Source have been saying - that real companies are getting real value by using open source. It is cheaper for them to pay for a feature to be added to some open source software than to have proprietary software developed to their specifications. Licenses like GPL make it compulsory for those companies to contribute those changes back to the community, but unless you're in the software business this is really not a disadvantage at all. Open source lets you pay less to get the features you need and *still* reap the Public Relations benefits of having "contributed to the community". Sounds like a CEO's dream!
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
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.
You can do it because you 100% want to (OSS), or because you 100% get paid (commercial). But what's wrong with there being a whole range from 1-99%? And on a simple "the higher the rates, the less people willing" basis, most of them will be on the low end. A small bonus perhaps. But what's wrong with that?
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Wanted Dead Or Alive
Fugitive Name: ClippyBounty: $10,000
Details: For causing the Great Depression.
The Great Depression was a period of er, depression, among PC users. Clippy was known to smirk and annoy users who required genuine help. Many of the victims suffered brain damage and voted for George W. Bush. Clippy is known to travel naked and was last seen on Microsoft Windows (see Bill Gates wanted poster).
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.
$150 buys 1 hour of my time! It's low skilled whores like yourself that screw up the market for real professionals.
...some times you don't.
For those of you who don't get this, it's a reference to an old TV commercial for Bounty/Mounds chocolate candy.
Aren't these bounties missing the point?
It seems to me the biggest lacking in OSS is not the featureset, it is the usability of that featureset. Take gimp for example. It's an excellent image editor. It has every feature I need. And yet I keep getting drawn back to photoshop when I need to get real work done, because gimp is such a PITA to use (less so than it used to be admittedly, but still not anywhere near what it could be).
This pattern for me is repeated over and over in almost all OSS projects. The few open source products I use on a daily basis and like are all centrally designed, with one person, or a few people, dictating the entire user-visible interface, like with firefox.
The total lack of usability progress in the vast majority of OSS projects is what made me give up on linux on the desktop. Yeah, it's fine to tinker, and yes, it does anything you need. But to get real work done it just gets in my way.
I don't mean to flame-bait, but that's my honest opinion. And I think if someone really wants to promote open source software, they are better off investing their resources in convincing projects to appoint design czars who have absolute control over the user-visible part of the software. Even a poorly done single-person design is still better than a methodically executed design by committee. These bounties for me are missing the point, and won't really matter in the end.
Anyway, imho ofcourse.
I always think about NetBeans and Eclipse and how they are both these OSS projects that are funded by large companies. Most of the code for these projects has been written by developers on the dole from either Sun or IBM. The question is, why should companies like IBM or Sun limit themselves to the pool of developers they have working in-house? I currently work as a developer 40+ hours a week, and while I have ideas for features to contribute and bugs I would like to see fixed in these products, I can't see programming outside of my job since the programming I do for work I get paid for. If Sun or IBM would sign a reasonable check for me to fix their products, I would be more likely to help them out.
"Is it time to consider quitting my day job to do open source development full time?"
One word.....YES!
On a totally unrelated note, could you please provide me with the contact info for your company's hiring manager?
...all you do is drive the much lower rate even lower.
Not a smart move.
I would have to disagree with this in some situations.
I do a lot of custom programming/development work, and most of this work is to get a competitive advantage over other companies. Using something where they have to redistribute those changes annulls that advantage and even creates a disadvantage because while they get it cheap, their competition would get it for free.Problems are like gifts, it's better to give than to receive
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
You mean like the Public Software Fund?
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
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
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
The AROS project has been doing bounties for a while now. http://www.aros.org/
I just dumped this cup of warm yellow liquid on the counter...
--
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