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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.
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
If you're doing it for free anyway, what's wrong with getting a little gift?
You are free not to accept it, keep it as memorabilia, or donate it to charity, as many have done in the past. People who found flaws in Knuth's books kept their $2 checks as a token of their work, rather than cashing it in.
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!
No, they just rate it low because the price they (may) be paying will be a slow/non-perfect developer. The ideal is "Hey, let's find the retired millionaire whiz and have him help out on a couple of things." In reality, the opposite extreme is you find the college aged whiz kid who disappears for three months because of terms or a big important project or he quit school.
While not similar work, I find this all the time in the graphic design field. You find a lot of people who ask for a "custom logo for my new website" and will pay paltry sums ($20, $200) when the real value of a logo (or a good designer's time) is worth a lot more than that.
I would imagine that putting low bounties on something is going to backfire. To someone who earns a living doing task X, spending 20 hours of their time helping out on OSS Project Y is going to be just difficult whether or not you pay. These projects need to un-monetize the incentives. Offering $100 for something that takes a lot of hours isn't going to be a big draw.
Of course, the bigger the project the less of a monetary incentive might be necessary. Ask me to create a logo for your company and get paid $50, I'll pass. Ask me to do the next logo for Firefox 1.5, and I don't need $50, I'll do it for free. (Note I am not comparing my work to Burka & Desroches, or saying the logo needs a replacement, just using Firefox as an example).
Of course, even with an OSS project, you can use free market concepts. The "price" of your product is people's time and resources as they download & learn your product. If you have informed a good number of people about your product and they are not willing to give their time to learn it, it may be because something better already exists. That's one reason why someone's new CD ripper project may not be that popular, or why your Java tetris clone is not being downloaded. It's not really "needed". Or at least, not yet.
I really don't mean to troll or flame, and I don't see a problem with people getting together on something for the sake of learning and/or collaborating. But before your five team members pool together $500 to take your project to the next level, take some time to consider if it is really realyl worth it.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Yes, but it's not quite "build us a front-end and get $500". It's "be the first to build us a front-end and get $500". If you come in second, or miss the feature set and get delayed, you very well may get nothing for your effort.
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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.
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.
"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?
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