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Site tracks F/OSS coding bounties
chatooya writes "Bounty County is a new website that lists programming bounties for free and open source software projects. It was launched this week by the Participatory Culture Foundation, which has some bounties of their own. You can search, browse, or get feeds of new bounties and if your project is offering a bounty, you can list it here." This is, IIRC, the fourth incaranation of a site like this that I've seen. Maybe this one will work.
The site currently lists only Gnome, projects. Bounties range from 200$ to 4500$
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
And it's worth $290,650
there will ever be a single "decent" repository of any programming job available that enables anyone to take advantage of it!
I know (myself included) that I could almost leave my full-time role and focus on this type of development for a while to come!
http://www.gibby.net.au
Frankly there is one problem with bounties - the vast majority of them are very, very low when compared to what even an entry level programmer could earn putting in the same number of hours as would be needed to complete most of them.
By comparison, the bounties can have a habbit of pushing off the normal volunteers from those areas - some don't like the idea of getting paid for a free project (in much the same way people helping out a charity will often reject any attempt at compensation), while others don't want the pressure of a "paid" project; they just want to have fun and help out an open source project.
That leaves you with only one big audiance for bounties - high school kids and bums in college who are riding on their parents money (actual paying students need to work real jobs to get enough money to pay tuition). Neither of these groups are all that great for accomplishing the goals of bounties - they tend to lack the drive and responsibility of more mature coders, and can easily turn in garbage that just fills the requirement list in order to get the money.
To work bounties need to either be bigger and/or offer some of kind of other incentive, or they need to be tailored to that 14 year old high school student crowd - smaller, easier to evaluate, harder to screw up. Basically farm out the low level tasks with bounties, and have the core team work on the real features.
Nobody should think they'll actually make money at this. The # of hours required for the $ earned is going to far exceed what a competent programmer could earn doing standard contracting work. And that's not to mention that there may be multiple people working towards one "bounty" at the same time, winner-take-all. And don't forget about scope creep - from one of the limewire projects... "The code is done when we say it's done".
That said, I don't disapprove of this - just want to clarify that open source is still basically a volunteer effort, and while this is a nice token and perhaps a nice incentive, it shouldn't be confused with actual contract work or a means of livelihood.
I think this is frontier work. Hard to see how anyone can deny this is a worthy project. Looks like early days and this will surely get better. But here are my questions/thoughts about bounties..
/. ;)
1) How is the project itself funding the site? Perhaps they take a small percentage of the bounties.
2) Wages are VERY low. It's just a start. As a focal point will serve both ends. Eventually business who want OS changes but don't have inhouse skills will use it to post (hopefully valuable) bounties.
3) A problem arises because bounties will be cherry picked with the most rewarding stuff getting done quickly and the difficult and boring stuff getting left to one side.
4) It goes against the scratch-an-itch motive. As per (3) some stuff will just never get takers because it's too obscure or dull while some bounties will be overwhelmed with applicants thinking "I was going to do exactly that anyway"
5) This needs to expand beyond mere code. Design, test, maintainance, documentation and secondary assets are all a vital part of good software. For example paying graphic artists to design an entire new icon set in a consistent theme, or a bounty for a test report on 20 different hardware platforms that a computer shop owner could complete.
6) Better skill based categories and micropayments for quick consultancy. For example I am an expert on DSP and could probably fix a complicated sound/video problem by altering a few lines of code. How could I get just a dollar for looking in on the source and saying "Yeah you need to cast this var as an integer and wrap it"?
7) How are multiple bounty collisions handled? If 10 programmers all took on the bounty on the first day chances are they will all finish at about the same time so a first to the post gets paid system is quite unfair. Also this gives incentive to the quickest and hence probably lowest quality/least tested effort (a bit like the rush to post on
However farming them out on a round robin basis is inefficient.
So SkuttleMonkey finally went to bed!? Or died in his slashdot chair like one of those mad chinese gamers? Hemos is dragging up some unusual stories, actually its refreshing to see less popularist material, good stuff.
You might be interested in the perception of bounties in some bigger projects.
t y.html
Once, Aaron Seigo writes about why he sees bounties with scepticism, also referring to a $30,000 Gimp Bounty gone awry.
http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2005/11/mutiny-on-boun
And the original article by Dave Neary detailing what went wrong.
http://dneary.free.fr/gimp_bounties.html
Obviously it's not that easy to support F/OSS, especially not by offering bounties.
ok... so i checked out the pages and there is NOTHING for C++ and im getting the feeling that they wont allow it. honestly, what the hell is wrong with C++?! as for a large projects, it makes them more maintainable and modular. so what is the deal? i understand having a preference to it but lets get real, everyone in the professional world (yes, including the ones who make high quality products) who are making professional apps go with some form of C++, whether it be C# or Java. yes, im calling java a c++ derivative. id love to help but this C elitism is killing me.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
These businesses are using you like slaves [which, for those of you who like to ponder old parchment documents written by dead white European males, was outlawed many score of years ago].
$1000 would barely pay for one contractor day if the contractor were hired through an agency at prevailing rates:
And believe it or not, an employee [with SS, Mdcr/Mdcd, UnEmpl Ins, Roth, 401K, Health, Dental, etc etc etc] would probably cost even more.These people are trying to fool you into creating enterprise-level software, involving something like a man-year's worth of labor, at renumeration rates of maybe tenths of a cent per hour.
PLEASE WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COFFEE!!!
Even /.-ers can't be this stupid, can they?
Why use bounties to get programmers? Aren't there enough people on SourceForge willing to help out (if it is really a good idea that you have, that is) ...
I know for a fact I've had at least 10 people ask to help me out... and I'm not even looking for help...
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
I see bounties as providing one strong net positive assuming their popularity grows. It gives a good indicator of where true need exists for incremental change.
In most cases, these changes are going to be requested by those who feel they don't have the expertise to produce those changes themselves. When the bounty total approaches the true cost, you'll known people are pretty serious.
This doesn't harm open source in that visionaries and those wanting to do something just for fun can still do so. It can help existing open source evolve to be more useful.
For those of you concerned about open source not being free, don't forget that RedHat, SuSE and Nessus have done quite well in supporting open source. In all three cases, developers are being paid full time to work on them but the code remains freely available and modifiable.
Where I do see a real problem is when an IP originator refuses to make their software truly free. Sun with Java is a good example of this. You have to meet their criteria in order to continue calling what you produce "Java". Intentionally or not, that causes real problems with innovation when proposed changes don't meet Sun's business plan.
As a final point, bounties WILL run into trouble when there's disagreement on a requested set of functionality. If the conditions stated in the bounty aren't clear enough, this can even happen after the fact. I don't envy the site management company when those sorts of situations hit. Some will inevitably escalate into the court system.
...project management system that incorporates bounties into the core of the system. It's run by myself and my buddy Warren. We act as the escrow for all bounties placed in the system, so if it says there X dollars for a request, there truly is.
Think of a SourceForge.net site with bounty handling built-in to tasks (feature requests, bug reports, etc). Also, I'd like to think that we're a bit easier to use from both the project manager's perspective and the end-user's perspective.
We have SVN support and a bunch of other good stuff, and we're adding new features constantly (it's still a "beta" service).
http://bountysource.com/
I bet a number of these get completed by people in developing countries where wages are not be as high. Some of the current bounties pay what I'd estimate to be about $100 per 8 hours of work. Not a great wage for most American programmers, but very high for a developing country.
There is a generation of users that would love to see more functionality in their computer, but have no idea how to cause that to occur... this same generation understands that they go to google to find things, ebay to sell things, amazon to buy things, etc.
Why not give them one place to go to make things work?
Bounty coders could become the handymen of the information age -- if the place for posting a bounty is easy enough to find for non-technocrats.
This is not an occupation - for that you want 'freelance coder' - this is a market for odd-jobs. Incidentally, I tried to get one of these things started - http://www.bountycoder.org/ - but, well, it hasn't exactly jumped off the line...