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.