Re: Bounty for Bugs in Open Source Projects?

Bounty for bugs is very difficult to do for several reasons:

1st) The bounty hunter has to pass the learning curve of the product before
fixing the problem.
Given the fact that many open source projects are poorly documented, this
may mean a full week of work.
If the bug is small then is rare than anybody is willing to pay 1,000 or
2,000 dollars for fixing it,
and if the bug is truly critical then the user is most probably thinking
about throwing the product to the bin.

2nd) Signing contracts and performing international payments to individuals
is not a trivial task.
Ever tried to get or put money from a personal account at a Western Europe
bank to San Francisco?

3rd) Finding qualified people who is not working full time for someone else
is not easy.

4th) Assuring quality and mergeing the fix-ups with the main code branch is
complicated.

I think that only chance is that the project already has a pool of people
available
who are in contact with the core development team.

Regards.
Sergio.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Nik Cubrilovic" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, April 18, 2005 4:37 AM
Subject: Bounty for Bugs in Open Source Projects?


>
> 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?
>
> Regards,
> Nik
>
> --
> www.nik.com.au | www.perfected.org
>
>
>