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Site tracks F/OSS coding bounties

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the making-some-money dept.

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.

3 of 41 comments (clear)

  1. 4th times a charm? by Michalson · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  2. Bounties are very interesting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  3. Developing Countries? by bigtrike · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.