Re: Bounty for Bugs in Open Source Projects?

Nik Cubrilovic wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I am interested to know if there is currently an initiative for commercial
> organisations to offer a bounty (cash incentive) for bugs or features to
> be implemented in Open Source projects. The company I work for would be
> interested in paying developers on Open Source projects to implement
> features, and to fix certain bugs that we require in some software, but
> the only way to do this at the moment seems to be to contact the project
> leader, or to post to the corresponding project mailing list with the
> details.
> 
> So is there some central way to do this? If there is not, I would be
> interested in setting up a site to facilitate this and kick it off by
> having the company I work for pay developers for bug fixes and features.
> What would the implications be for such a scheme?

I think it's been tried a few times in various formats. Nowadays, you 
mostly see projects such as Mozilla, Gnome, Open Office and Ubuntu 
offering bounties on specific tasks.

There's also the concept of reverse bounties, where a developper write 
down a specification, an estimate of the work needed to implement the 
feature, and finally puts a price tag on it. That gets posted somewhere, 
and when enough money is accumulated, the coder finishes the job and 
releases his code.

I could give you a few references another day, too tired right now.

-- 
Robin Millette, aka oqp http://rym.waglo.com/wordpress/
http://www.cogitateurs-agitateurs.org/ - Cogitateurs Agitateurs