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Bounties for free software
Gerg sent us a quick blurb from
news.com which says
``In an attempt to jump-start XSL development, Sun Microsystems and Adobe are putting up $90,000 in bounties for independent developers who come up with specific XSL implementations''
Interesting implications. Is this the future of software
development? This actually is one of the more common questions
that people ask me about. Would a bounty system for software
really work? Would it make the suits and the hackers
happy? I don't have an answer.
Why not just HIRE someone to write it, jeezz..
But on the other hand, there's a lot more money at stake here than for the typical FSB project.
;-)
BTW, I too have to wonder: why don't they just pay their programmers to write the software? As it is, it seems like these guys are exploiting cheap student labor. What happens if 15 guys write an XSL implementation? Will they all get $30K? Yeah, right
I'm completely for bounties, especially in regards to programming. It allows for independence on the part of the programmers and the company. With bounties a viable work-from-home-for-a-good-career system could be established. Open bounties allow for the first person to meet the specs to get the prize.
Bounties for smaller requests work very well. For an example, see http://www.experts-exchange.com.
As far as driving an entire project, I guess it remains to be seen, but it sure would be a nice world if I could go out to my local "information exchange" and pick up a couple jobs, do them, and then not work for a couple weeks, etc.
They're not even faking it.
What is it? I'm assuming it's different than XML.
The bounty idea would work for an entity that can make the investment as a risk. The system can work in theory. It can spawn collaborative efforts and give a good return on the dollar. The bounty is usually assured to be near fair value for the services rendered since noone would want to try for a bounty if they don't feel it's worth it. Any company who would undercut (work for a cheap bounty) might not do good work anyway. If an entity offers up a bounty, they would work on pricing it appropriately: weighing in the opportunity cost and value of return.
I can't see a group of freelance programmers gambling on something like this UNLESS they do it with the open source spirit: they do it because they would welcome the challange as a hobby, more or less, or would like to reap in the benefits of providing support. The bounty would be icing on the cake should they "win" it.
Now, if we can only get the government to do bouties...
You must have paid all-cash on the barrel for your house. People with a mortgage (or just wishing to qualify for one) will have to think different. Turnaround on this form of work is neither quick nor constant.
This is just Adobe looking longingly at the development of OPen Source projects and wanting some of that speed --but unwilling to part with any of their uber-proprietariness in exchange. Won't work.
'Nuf said.
XSL is an XML application that maps other XML applications to HTML-like appearances ("block element", "list", and such). It makes XML browsers possible.
I think the bounty system would have many drawbacks, mainly it would be difficult to set the rules surrounding the competition.
Do you just accept the first person/team done, or have a due date and then review every submission?
The fear of coming in second many times in a row will keep people out of the market, and people won't be able to do it in their spare time like they do with open source, b/c there will always be a full-time bounty hunter that will finish the project well before them.
You will also see the exact opposite of open source happen. In order to successfully beat another team to the finish, people will hoard code. Not just for that one project, they will hoard their entire code base so that no other team will have the advantage of their tool set.
Since the financial incentive is to NOT cooperate with people outside the group, code will be hoarded as greedily as warez.
-jackd
It's an excellent idea; the estimate (for the offerer) and the risk (for the coder) are the only problems. So I'm doing it the other way around- write an app, sell binaries as shareware, and when the money adds up to the declared value of the labor (which I know when I finish), free the source. I call it ransomware.
Free Software is work-for-hire for the community. If we can set norms that commissioning it is sensible, and spread the burden, we all win.
Obviously the GNOME and E guys don't believe in the stability-before-fancy looks idea. ;-)
Spend some time in research. Most inventions come out of basic research which uses this funding model. In the "old days", money would be given and scientists/engineers could play with new ideas and follow their noses, but now they need to prove what exactly they want to do and what results they expect (with timelines) in their grant proposals. This sounds similar to what the companies are suggesting, with the exception that they'll probably want patent/copyright dibs on the work.
DOE, DOD, NCIC, NIH...with such big names using this approach successfully, why shouldn't industry?
sorry dude, ordinarily I'd love to study the spec and tell ya, but now that there's real money involved with a web standard there's no incentive for me to share.
;-)
Hey, Sun and Adobe don't want to hire people because really good programmers are expensive. :-). And this doesn't include v-days, sick days, health benefits, matching 401k funds, life insurance...you get the picture.
(I make > $140k/year
Having some OSS coder write up the code "for free" and made available is great for the vendors and oh, "we're supporting OSS development methods ala Cathederal and the Bazaar so we're so friendly to the OSS revolution". It's a marketing issue more than anything...because this will die unless it's integrated in Mozilla and other clients programs.
For code that has real IP value, there was always be well paid and very productive coders. Otherwise, a lot of OSS fans are going to have to work jobs administering NT systems for small companies while working on OSS at night...
...the results were open source, it was paid by a consortium (maybe something like XFree or the Open Group or the W3C) to individuals (or groups splitting the money), and an individual could only win once.
This would get a lot of code out there, and move the art forward I would think.
Don't demonize money. Money is just a physical representation of "effort." I do work and trade it for something. Since bartering for chickens is pretty dull and cumbersome (give me the chicken and I'll cut it in half later to trade for corn), I'll take a marker for the work I do and trade it for something usefull (like a pre-cut chicken and a can of corn) at my leisure.
By deomonizing money, you're deomonizing someone who is doing work. Trading your work for something in return of equal value is an honest thing. Money just simplifies the trade.
I'll code for money so I can swap it for chicken and corn later...
(ok, enough with the chicken and corn)
In short, what would be the point?
The second set of prizes, funded in part by Adobe, will provide a
$40,000 first prize and a $20,000 second prize for a print-oriented
batch formatter written in Sun's Java programming language and that
supports Adobe's portable document format (PDF).
I see the second part of the contest as a Java programming contest... designed to promote Java more than anything else.
Sure. The person/people who win the bounty for a program are the ones that already have a full toolbox of fast collection classes, specialized widgets, several IPC frameworks and an assortment of other objects at their disposal before the bounty is announced.
In fact, the winners will likely be small design houses/systems integrators who have a couple programmers with some free time to rework an existing product to do a new task. It quickly degenerates into the current model for most outsourcing.
The little guy definitely will not win this.
The difference is that with a grant, I get the money, then I do the work. Here, I do the work and if I'm lucky, then I get the money.
I agree. It will also have impact, imo, on sharing. If this really takes off, then whoever already has something close to the specs when the bounty is announced will get there first, because it's often faster to modify existing code than it is to write new code. So if a free software developer comes up with something for which there is no bounty, it may be attractive to hold onto it instead of putting it on the net.
I've seen instances of open-source developers competing (due to jealousy and my-project-dammit syndrome) instead of sharing, and it really really sucks. If bounties become commonplace, it may sicken the community.
One of the benefits of OSS is that other people can help collaborate in finding and fixing bugs if they have the source code. You loose this in your ransomeware development model. You're back to cathederal style development.
I'm not convinced that the bounty system can handle this either. In order to collect on the bounty, you'll have to show who put together the project. If it is a collection of strangers on the internet who contribute to the project, you're likely to have all sorts of problems distributing the cash.
I still prefer the contract approach. That is, a company wants some work done. They contract a lead programmer for the project. That person then does the development in collaboration with others interested in the project with an OSS license.
In the end, the company gets the software they wanted for cheap, the countractor gets paid, and contributors also get the software and can continue development. Licensing the software with the GPL fits in wonderfully for all involved. As a bonus to the company that paid for the work, they get the copyright and can license the software under different terms.
The Free Software Bazzar  Where free software is bought and sold. Not really. It's the work that's bought and sold. The software is usually GPL'd, so it's not bought, sold, OR free. Set up for posting of offers of money for someone to complete a free SW project or patch and to praise those that pay off and embarass those that don't.
--
Anonoumous (except to people with money to pay off the legal profession)
interesting, dude....
you might be on to something
The bounty system will hopefully fall on its face. It discourages cooperation and can't reasonably match the programmers work.
However, there are still many projects in which the company just needs the program, but not the IP. In other words, there is no strong market to justify paying 12 people for one year, about $1 - $2 million developing the software. But they could afford to pay one or two contractors to do the job.
For these, how about the companies put together a proposal for the job, then take bids. The company evaluates the different contractors and chooses one. Part of the agreement though is that the software be developed under the GPL or other OSS license agreement. The core developers get the requirements, architecture, design and initial devleopment.
Does this strike anybody but me as being a tad feudal ala the king putting out a reward for the
person who can solve problem X?
Solve this particular Gordian knot and become His Royal Geek or one of the Court Programmers?
I've always said we were moving towards a time of corporate feudalism, this just pushes it a step further IMHO.
microeconomics != macroeconomics
Thank you.
In applying for a grant, one has probably done much of the initial work already. You can't receive money these days without preliminary results, at least with a feasibility study. And the more data you have, the better your chances against the competition. Generally, results are held back to avoid the reviewers concluding that the work is already done and does not merit funding. Strange system...
How many people are going to share their source WHILE they are working on it and BEFORE the prize is awarded? Instead of a lot of programmers working on a single code base finding and squashing each other's bugs, you are going to have lots of programmers duplicating each other's efforts in secret for the $40K prize.
I think there needs to be a way to fund such efforts while encouraging people to share information during development.
What if, instead of a bounty for the programming, there was a bounty for the design? The design would have to be quite complete, of course, a full architectural spec to match the feature spec put out by the offerer of the prize. The designs could be evaluated, and the winning designer(s) would get a prize for their work, and then maybe another prize could be offered to the winner for the successful completion of the project. That way, development could be open source, because by the time coding began, the recipient of the prize would be already determined; there would be no incentive for hoarding code.
It could be made even more interesting by making the second stage prize more of a budget. That is, upon successful completion (with "successful" subject to much wrangling I'm sure), the winner(s) of the design prize would get more money as compensation for stewarding the project, but they would also get some money to dole out to the significant contributors to the project. Thus, there would still be an incentive-based competition of sorts happening among the contributors. If you tried to withhold your code until the last minute, however, you may get shut out by someone who's been integrating his/her patches in all along.
This is all just off the top of my head, so it may be fatally and obviously flawed, but it seems interesting. Well, to me anyways. Any comments?
Rob Millerrob@xeaglex.com
now that adobe wants to buyout corel graphics, before corel ports that product line over too, adobe and sun want dingy joe-student to surrender his/her code, for the prospect of a small bounty.
Ultimately, this serves only to prevent that student from starting as small developer and getting his own product introduced in the marketplace. This has got to out-bill the greatest bill of all, who stole every dime "he" earned from others.
Student "A" to adobe Bounty Coordinator "B": "here is my code. look it over and let me know when I get my bounty."
a week goes by--
adobe Bounty Coordinator "B" to Student "A": "geez, guess what kiddo, some other student in china sent in the same code just the week before. Too bad, huh; I'm just a bounty coordinator, you know. Uhh, any more code you want to submit."
Uh, duh, dey wuddint do dat noww wud day! geez, maybe I can win the lottery someday.
It's all about the growing master-slave relationship between the wall street apparatus and the filthy hoi poloi who code their wealth. Your choices are simple, launch a $100,000 legal effort to prove that the code-equal chinese never existed, or form you own damn union, and protect the prospect of freedom for your grandchildren.
My aching ass: "The firms plan to eventually put the winning technologies in the public domain." Wha da fuk, the student can do that himself!
i'm not saying that the adobe deal is a perfected working
S ocial.html
conception -> but it indicates the beginning of a new way
of working that could be extended much more fully along
the following lines:
--| Towards a New Scoial Economic Ordering |-----
Genuine interests of right can only spring up on a ground where
the life of rights is separately cultivated, and where the only
consideration will be what the rights of a matter are. When
people proceed from such considerations to frame rules of right,
the rules thus made will take effect in economic life. Then it
will not be necessary to place a restriction on the individual
acquiring economic power; for such power will only result in his
rendering econornic achievements proportionate to his abilities,
but not in using this to obtain privileged rights. . . Only when
rights are ordered in a field where a business consideration
cannot in any way come into question, where business can procure
no power over this system of rights, will the two be able to work
together in such a way that men's sense of right will not be
injured, nor economic ability be turned from a blessing to a
curse for the community as a whole.
When those who are economically powerful are in a position to use
their power to wrest privileged rights for themselves, then among
the economically weak there will grow up a corresponding
opposition to these privileges; and this opposition must as soon
as it has grown strong enough lead to revolutionary disturbances.
If the existence of a special province of rights makes it
impossible for such privileged rights to arise, then disturbances
of this sort cannot occur. . . One will never really touch what
is working up through the social movement to the surface of
modern life, until one brings about social conditions in which,
alongside the claims and interests of the economic life, those of
rights can find realization and satisfaction on their own
independent basis.
THE FUNDAMENTAL SOCIAL LAW
And this is the law of the wild,
As old and as true as the sky.
And the wolf who keeps it will prosper,
But the wolf who breaks it will die!
Like the wind that circles the tree trunk,
this law runneth forward and back.
The strength of the pack is the wolf,
and the strength of the wolf is the pack.
(Rudyard Kipling)
'The well-being of a community of people working together will be
the greater, the less the individual claims for himself the
proceeds of his work, i.e. the more of these proceeds he makes
over to his fellow-workers, the more his own needs are satisfied,
not out of his own work but out of the work done by others'.
In practice, however, this is quite impossible if the
individual's share of weal and woe is measured according to his
labour. He who labours for himself *must* gradually fall a victim
to egoism. Only one who labours solely for the rest can gradually
grow to be a worker without egoism.
But there is one thing needed to begin with. If any man works for
another, he must find in this other man the reason for his work;
The ideal is to work for a structure of society whereby the
criterion of increase in capital will no longer be the only power
to which production is subject-it should rather be the symptom,
which shows that the economic life, by taking into account all
the requirements of man's bodily and spiritual nature, is rightly
formed and ordered...
Now it is just in so far as they can be bought and sold for sums
of capital in which their specific nature finds no expression,
that economic values become commodities. But the commodity nature
is only suited to those goods or values which are directly
consumed by man. For the valuation of these, man has an immediate
standard in his bodily and spiritual needs. There is no such
standard in the case of land, nor in the case of means of
production. The valuation of these depends on many factors, which
only become apparent when one takes into account the social
structure as a whole...
Where 'supply and demand' are the determining factors, there the
egoistic type of value is the only one that can come into reckon
ing. The 'market' relationship must be superseded by associations
regulating the exchange and production of goods by an intelligent
observation of human needs. Such associations can replace mere
supply and demand by contracts and negotiations between groups of
producers and consumers, and between different groups of
producers...
Work done in confidence of the return achievements of others
constitutes the giving of *credit* in social life. As there was
once a transition from barter to the money system, so there has
recently been a progressive transformation to a basis of credit.
Life makes it necessary today for one man to work with means
entrusted to him by another, or by a community, having confidence
in his power to achieve a result. But under the capitalistic
method the credit system involves a complete loss of the real and
satisfying human relationship of a man to the conditions of his
life and work. Credit is given when there is prospect of an
increase of capital that seems to justify it; and work is always
done subject to the view that the confidence or credit received
will have to appear justified in the capitalistic sense. And what
is the result? Human beings are subjected to the power of
dealings in capital which take place in a sphere of finance
remote from life. And the moment they become fully conscious of
this fact, they feel it to be unworthy of their humanity...
A healthy system of giving credit presupposes a social structure
which enables economic values to be estimated by their relation
to the satisfaction of men's bodily and spiritual needs. Men's
economic dealings will take their form from this. Production will
be considered from the point of view of needs, no longer by an
abstract scale of capital and wages.
Economic life in a threefold society is built up by the
cooperation of *associations* arising out of the needs of
producers and the interests of consumers. In their mutual
dealings, impulses from the spiritual sphere and sphere of rights
will play a decisive part. These associations will not be bound
to a purely capitalistic standpoint, for one association will be
in direct mutual dealings with another, and thus the one-sided
interests of one branch of production will be regulated and
balanced by those of the other. The responsibility for the giving
and taking of credit will thus devolve to the associations. This
will not impair the scope and activity of individuals with
special faculties; on the contrary, only this method will give
individual faculties full scope: the individual is responsible to
his association for achieving the best possible results. The
association is responsible to other associations for using these
individual achievements to good purpose. The individual's desire
for gain will no longer be imposing production on the life of the
community; production will be regulated by the needs of the
community...
All kinds of dealings are possible between the new associations
and old forms of business--there is no question of the old having
to be destroyed and replaced by the new. The new simply takes its
place and will have to justify itself and prove its inherent
power, while the old will dwindle away... The essential thing is
that the threefold idea will stimulate a real social intelligence
in the men and women of the community. The individual will in a
very definite sense be contributing to the achievements of the
whole community... The individual faculties of men, working in
harmony with the human relationships founded in the sphere of
rights, and with the production, circulation and consumption that
are regulated by the economic associations, will result in the
greatest possible efficiency. Increase of capital, and a proper
adjustment of work and return for work, will appear as a final
consequence...
(from: "Understanding the Human Being", selected writings of
Rudolf Steiner, Chapter 7 - Reordering of Society: - The
Threefold Commonwealth, foreword. 1920, GA 24. - Anthroposophy
and the Social Question. 1905/06, GA 34. - Anthroposophy, 1927
Vol. II, No.3, "Capital and Credit", 1919, GA 24. Edited by
Richard Seddon, Rudolf Steiner Press, Bristol, 1993, ISBN: 1
85584 005 7)
Source@:
http://home.earthlink.net/~johnrpenner/Steiner-
(the last paragraph)
I predict that some enterprising developer will pre-emptively announce an XSL project on the web. The effect of this FUD tactic will be to scare other developers away, and if he and his crew never finishes the project, the net result may be that the companies *never* get their precious code.
Sorry guys, your bounty hunter model is stupid. Find another model.
in fact, the NIH totally missed it because
it was too controversial for anyone to
actually do actual scientific studies on,
the only people doing it were the CDC and
of course the institut pasteur and other ppl in Europe...
the 'grant' funding model produces intense counter cooperative
competition, ask biotech people if they share any technology that they create... the answer is hell no
im sure there are other examples of problems with the scheme in the DOD etc...
everyone is just worried about getting a grant (thats your food on your table) so if they can produce research that confirms ideas that the grant givers like, they get more,
if they want to do anything controversial or actually think for themselves using only reason as a base (remember thats the whole point of science.. ) well they are screwed.. they will go hungry and get fired.
that www.w3.org page is written in some
odd non-english tongue.
is this just another way to screw over lynx users?
because the whole idea is to "not" hire sombody. If they put up a 'bounty' on the software they perpetuate a instant adrenain rush for the small buseness man and hacker alike.
The current comercial system for software development is pathetic as is, by createing a chance for pr and indorcement from a big time corp. Not to mention the purse is nothing to laugh at.. I truely think that this is the right thing.
and the person who comes out with the better implementation two hours later gets the shaft. don't know that I like this...
(It would be nice if people could be as dispassionate about OSS principles as they are about, say, the principles of
thermodynamics, like this: Yes, this is how things work, and therefore these are the actions we need to take to get what we
want, and we need to know all that and act consistently with it, but we don't need to lose sleep over it.)
I'm not in on the Linux or OSS movement out of any moral or religous issue. When I first started in on computers, I was banging away at Basic interpreter interfaces and the like. When I got my first PC, I was using microsoft products, because they worked at the time. When I heard about Linux and how it was a useful implementation of unix (rather than minix) on a PC, I started playing with that.
I use Linux because it works. It does everything I need it to do.
The same can be said for the 'Desktop' battle. I use KDE as the basis for my desktop. It functions, and it's releases have been on the whole, more stable than GNOME[1].
However, rather than using kvt, I compiled Eterm. I like it. It has nice features, and looks good with the way I have my desktop built.
A good quarter of my applications that I run on a daily basis are from the gnome project, or at least use its libraries. I use them because they work the way I like them to.
The issues of open source of the QT libraries don't bother me. Troll seems perfectly happy with me running my desktop and not giving them any money, so I don't worry about it. If GNOME gets, in my opinion, better than KDE, I'll swtich. No love lost, as I'll probably still run all the KDE apps I did before, anyway.
[1]: This is no knock against GNOME. They're up front about it, and it's still a work in progress. I know 1.0 came out recently, and I haven't checked it out, but one has to admit that KDE's releases have been, on the whole, more stable.
-sm@vis.nu
See my reply to "bounty hunters vs bounty coders", in the thread above
Yes, FUD is a powerful tool for bounty coders. In fact I don't see any other way bounty coding could be worthwhile.
Then you have to:
* Pay health insurance
* Withhold taxes
* Pay other benefits and overtime
* Manage the programmer
The salary is a tiny chunk of what it costs a company to maintain a single employee. Far easier just to pay a bounty and avoid the administrative costs.
: Why not just HIRE someone to write it, jeezz.
I guess you don't work in the business world.
Now $90k might seem like a lot to you, but trust me, it far cheaper than hiring people to do it.
You have bloaty overhead rates, benefits, management costs, and a hard time finding GOOD sw engineers in the valley. And don't forget projects have a real tendency to over run their schedule.
Only $90k for a completed project like this without the risk of failure is a bargain in the Valley I live in.
What are the ramifications of this?
* Companies can be more profitable.
* Move the software development overseas to places like India where the wages are low and the skill is high. My Indian friends say India has a management infrastructure problem and the government is hostile to foreign business but that can change.
* The wanna-be engineers in the valley (i.e. talently deficient) could be in for a world of hurt. Who am I kidding, as long as the Valley is still hot and management is still craving bodies to throw into the open fire, even the most lacking engineer can find a job.
- erik olson
This fits right into the "new IT market paradigm," which is results oriented, rather than process oriented. Linux, *BSD, etc. are showing folks that the elusive productivity gain, until recently only a Microsoft.Myth, is possible. Adobe, et al are beginning to realize that paying for results is much more cost-effective than paying for process.
The comments about "bountyware" bypassing all the hassles that come with employment makes me think that the gubmints must be getting a little nervous about this. They could stand to lose a lot of money and power if this concept succeeds (I think it will).
I envy the younger geeks who are just getting involved--the software industry is finally getting its act together and I'll be dead or hopelessly senile in thirty years. Damn. At least if I'm only senile I'll be able to go to work for Microsoft. I wonder if they allow employees to wear polyester and carry drool cups?
slashdot broke my sig
Bounty is something that one can specificaly work for and somehow rely on being paid. But then the announcement should be made in public, in some clear way, so developers should be able to tell, what they actually should do to win one, and what can be expected.
Grant is something that is paid for some purpose in the expectation that something will be developed, but then it should be paid in advance. It's not a bad way to fund Open Source, and government and companies do it all the time. The down side is that competition for grants is often complex, bureaucracy-dependent and has little to do with the merit of the work done on grants.
Prize is something that is paid after the work, and prize awarding rules rarely are specific enough to leave any hope for developer that he can rely on a prize -- relying on even high announced prize will be like asking bank for a loan because he is working on a research for what he can win a Nobel Prize.
In this case the announcement is for a prize, not bounty or grant, so "financial incentive" mentioned in the article doesn't exist.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
If they were to take that 90K and hire one person, that one person may fail. If, instead, they wave the same 90K in front of the noses of the world's programmers, you may get several programmers to compete for the prize, perhaps increasing the odds of success.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
This, from a company that hasn't updated Photoshop for UNIX since... 3.0! WTF? Piss off. I'll use the GIMP, thanks.
Don't demonize money. Money is just a physical representation of "effort." I do work and trade it for something.
Just to get totally off topic....an analogy: Don't demonize Windows95. It's just a representation of commands I wish to give to the computer.
The point isn't that labour for reward is bad (at least *my* point isn't), I just think the implementation (ie the money system) is bad.
By deomonizing money, you're deomonizing someone who is doing work.
Not any more than demonizing win95 is demonizing someone for using a computer. There is always the possiblity of using another [operating] system.
Not that /. is the appropriate place for this discussion, but if "irregardless" can spawn 20 replies when talking about SMP, then why not :-)
dylan_-
--
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
A bit of clarification. There are two parts to XSL; some people consider it to actually be two different languages.
The first part specifies transformations from XML to something else (e.g., HTML, PDF, PostScript). This is the part that you seem to be referring to, though it's actually more general than what you describe, since the resulting document doesn't have to be HTML or HTML-like.
The second part is essentially a formatting language, like CSS. You can then use the XSL transformation language to process an XML document and spit out a set of XSL formatting elements.
Perhaps so, but at the worst we'll have a mediochre but working XSL implementation in Mozilla that can then be improved by self-motivated hackers. It would have happened eventually, to be sure, but it certainly doesn't hurt the effort to have money going into it.
The main rational for bounty hunters for capturing fugitives was so they could hire people on
consignment. This is no different than having your boss say to you: if you don't get this done
on time, I won't pay you for your time. The only reason you would stick around is if you thought
you could do it or you were stupid.
Also following this analogy, a bounty hunter doesn't have to keep the fugitive in a jail cell
and feed it for the next 30 years. Similarly, a bounty coder wouldn't need to support it.
Bounty hunters are opportunists, I would expect the same for bounty coders.
Probably not the best way to get code written, but to get bug reports or copies of viruses
this is probably a win.
Note there is a big flaw in this analogy. A bounty hunter knows that if he/she has the fugitive,
nobody else will get the bounty. Anybody and their grandmother can write code and beat you
to the punch.
If a bounty system is to work, it probably needs a registration system of some sort, so everyone knows who is already working on the project and how long they have been working on it. This way, if there are already a few people working on a project, new people will know that they would be at a disadvantage if they started now, and perhaps they would be better off picking a different project.
From the bouty-offerer's point of view it seems a smart thing to do: they hopefully get a lot of people to code on it for a quick implementation. But one of the advantages of open source software over proprietary software has been that there is no real pressure on the author, therefore he/she has all the opportunity to set stability/performance/elegance before fancy looks and speed-of-delivery. These bounties might endanger that.
I seem to recall a similar deal being offered by some company (SCO?) for anybody who reverse-engineers the protocol used by Windows Terminal Server. Does anybody else remember the details on that?
Adobe isn't Sun. Sun came up with java. Adobe thinks it's an important tool
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I'd sure love to see mozilla with XSL no matter how it gets in there. Last I heard, they just plugged expat (xml parser) in mozilla
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I think everyone should relax a little, you guys are all way too serious. When this sort of thing becomes commonplace, then start whining and complaining about it, until then, why don't we just see how it goes and if you want to, take part in it, and if you don't, don't.
> Why not just HIRE someone to write it, jeezz..
By offering a bounty, they don't have to screen programmers, hire programmers, or reject programmers. Instead, people who are interested in the project, the money, or both, can freely work on it. Sun and Adobe do not have to pay every programmer (or group) working on this project, just the winners (and runner-up for the Adobe offer).
What you end up with is cathedral-style development followed by bazaar-style distribution. First releases will be as buggy as any commercialware. But even the bazaared distribution isn't going to work here-- who's going to contribute bug fixes on a bountied software when they could be working toward new bounties? So not only does the initial release suffer, but post-release improvements suffer as well.
Bounties may have some benefits, but they really miss most of the advantages of OSS.
And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?
This charade limits the quality of work (no peer review) and the benifits for workers (no jobs). A more interesting model based on the bounty system is instead of the bounty going personally to you, the money is donated to a preset charity. With this model there is peer review (no incentive to hide code). This might incourage more people to work for free software, thinking that they are helping two things at once.
--
Four years in jail
No Trial, No Bail
*** FREE KEVIN ***
New worlds are not born in the vacuum of abstract
ideas, but in the fight for daily bread --Rudolf Rocke
Maybe you'll want to schedule price reductions based on when you hit certain fractions of the total. You'd probably still want at least a rough guess of the volume-demand curve for your software, and you'd want to run some simulations. But the periodic price reductions would probably come to be regarded as an indication of your good faith that you really will release the source code later on.
A simplistic approach, assuming you're developing something over a long time, and catering to a market that is eager for the latest version, would be to open-source old versions based on a constant time delay (maybe six or twelve months). This would be a little like a time-compressed version of the patent system.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
Maybe if people feel strongly about these toolsets, they can put up bounties for their release as well. In any event, I don't think the world will ever conform to anybody's ideas of how things ought to be, not mine nor yours nor RMS's. You can argue persuasively, you can explain your reasoning, and you can set a good example, but you can't really control what people do.
Can you propose an alternative to bounties, where all parties do at least as well as they do with bounties, and programmers and teams don't have an incentive to hoard tools? Nothing springs to my mind, but any such scheme would be a vast boon to OSS.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
(It would be nice if people could be as dispassionate about OSS principles as they are about, say, the principles of thermodynamics, like this: Yes, this is how things work, and therefore these are the actions we need to take to get what we want, and we need to know all that and act consistently with it, but we don't need to lose sleep over it.)
There are some really wonderful posts here. People are really thinking about what would happen if this became a widely-used way to finance OSS development. That's cool.
Ultimately, this being a free country, you can't control what people do (except the very crude control offered by the legal/penal system). The best thing is to argue eloquently for the ideas you think are best. People are using this as a forum to practice doing that.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
Once you hire people, there's insurance, a building to house them (factory), cost of overhead (such as lighting, etc). It's just much more profitable to outsource it out. A virtual CorpGov LLC with no inventory, buildings, employees and nothing but profit$.
It could work out the same for independent consultants too. No CorpGov LLC commute, no office politics, no staying 12 hours when you got done with the project in 8hrs. An actual life just might be yours, community, family and friends! Oh my.
an enigma wrapped around a paradox driven by a paradigm shift
Well, gnome is just a tremendously complex idea. They seem to have done a good job at implementing things so far. And their progress at fixing bugs seemed to be pretty good last I checked. Of course, i can't run gnome right now because it crashes my X server. I can't wait until I get my G200, hopefully the X server is better, and if not, I'm going to start participating in development.
On the E side of things, E has been perfectly stable for me for the last four months, and all but perfectly stable for the last year or so. I've almost never seen E crash, and I go back to the late 13.3 days. The only times I remember it crashed, it put upa window saying that it crashed, with an option to restart. If I selected restart, E restarted, and all my apps stayed up. Why do people always pick on E? it's extremely fast, with a small theme, it's pretty small, it looks great, and has tremendous flexibility to do things the way that I want them to be done (where I is the generic I).
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
This is perfect! Now stay at home coders can work on the projects they want to work on, and the companies will pick the best piece.
The only question is will other companies buy this? I certainly hope so.
StylishPants.Org - Home of everything that's interesting, and nothing that's not.
Heh.. i'll buy THAT for a dollar. :)
Bowie
Bowie J. Poag
Besides, what happens if a bunch of people get together and write one, but theirs isn't the first? They have a better implementation sitting there and they don't get paid for it? They would probably subsequently GPL it or something, so just letting all parties work together would be best in the first place. I agree that bounties could be good for small projects, but contracting out would probably work better in the long run and just using free software (and writing free software) would have the best outcome overall.
-- atomly
It seems to me that a system where a software contributor would get payed a royalty based on some measure of their contribution to the project (such as lines of code, for example) might be better than a winner-take-all bounty. This would encourage using the best portions of code from many different sources in much the same way that existing free open source projects work. This way programmers would remain independent and source would remain open but the contributors would ultimately get paid when the organizing entity sells the final product.
Two problems with the bounty system: risk and benefits. Programmers face too much risk and get no fringe benefits.
How about a modified bounty system: pay a large pool of remote programmers a "reasonable" base salary (it might be quite small if a programmer can sign up with more than one company) plus a bounty for achieving some programming goal. The problem is benefits. No one company will wish to pay a programmer's benefits because it would prefer to free ride on the rest. In this sense the benefits are a public good. How about a programmer's collective/cooperative to provide benefits to the group? Each member pays in (they would be willing to do so in order to share the risk of not winning a bounty), plus a small payment from each participating business.
Brent Hueth
I have to agree - Enlightenment is the fastest (depending on how many pixmaps you have it load keyword 'versatile') most stable, and again most versatile window manager I've come across - It's also staggeringly beautiful, and completely gnome-aware, they both compliment each other nicely, although a few gnome issues need to be fixed before it's perfect, but I really can't say enough 'bout E.
er..so there.
The second part of the Sun/Adobe prize is for an XSL formatting object to PDF formatter written in Java.
Six months ago I started writing what I still believe to be the only XSL formatting object formatter around and I happened to output as PDF and write in Java.
Due largely to lack of time, I haven't done much in the last few months. I would have accepted $5000 to finish it!
I'm going to try and finish it now.
see http://www.jtauber.com/fop/ as well as http://www.xmlsoftware.com/xsl/ for XSL-related software in general.
James