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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.
It lists other bounties, but seeing as it is so new, I'm guessing they haven't found very many yet. If people aren't visiting the site and sending them info for other bounties, then the listing on there will be very limited. There were bounties for Limewire, Horde and DTV. I'm sure if someone submitted a KDE bounty, they would post it.
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.
I think you miss the point of bounties. They neither are an equivalent to hiring a contract worker, nor are they intended to. They are an incentive for people who do the work for fun, or to help someone who is hesitant to take on a project. In fact, if the bounties were any higher they might be understood as a replacement for the coding fun, which is IMO undesirable.
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.
Well, you've apparently never had any involvement with professional programming, of any kind.
The most difficult part of programming is dividing up a project into small, easy to evaluate, difficult to screw up pieces. Doing that takes about 90% of the time, involves 90% of the effort, and usually involves multiple iterations of the entire development cycle to get right. You should count on several months of work by a highly qualified, extremely skilled developer to spec each week's worth of work for a low skill 14 year old high school student.
You might be interested in the perception of bounties in some bigger projects.
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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.
...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/