Re: Bounty for Bugs in Open Source Projects?

Robin Millette wrote:
> 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.

What's always seemed to me to the best way to do this is to combine the 
two approaches. That is, party A wants bug B fixed and invites tenders 
to do so, then chooses one.

The forward bounty approach seems to me to drive the market towards the 
cheapest (rather than the best) fix and certainly I rarely, if ever, see 
a bounty that even vaguely approaches the kind of money that would give 
me incentive to do the work.

OTOH, the reverse bounty suffers from the problem that its unlikely that 
a developer is going to find the bug and decide to offer to fix it.

I think there's definitely a difference with projects, where reverse 
bounties may make sense some of the time.

Cheers,

Ben.

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