Re: Bounty for Bugs in Open Source Projects?

Sergio Montoro Ten wrote:
> Given the fact that many open source projects are poorly documented, this
> may mean a full week of work.

The usual tasks for bounties vary between a few hours and a few months
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.

I see the main problem is that you need _many_ people offering money,
to provide enough to pay a developer.

Users don't want to pay a developer $10k for what may be 3 months
work.  They want to pay $20, with 499 other users doing the same.

But on the old bounty sites, I remember seeing things like $50 dollars
offered for writing a modem driver that might take a month or several
months to do properly (with testing etc.) - unfortunately, without the
necessary 100s of other users offering the same amount for the same task.

If you run a software company, spend $10,000's to develop a small
product, and then try to sell it, you have the same problem: finding
100s of users to buy the product.

The difference, as I see it, is the software company will market it's
product, to find those 100s of users.  The tasks put up on bounty
sites don't have active marketing to find the other users who might be
interesting in adding to the bounties.

> 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?

For smaller amounts and short work, a contract isn't needed.  I've
done little tasks and been sent a little money by paypal - from China
to the UK.  If the other person didn't pay, well, I just wouldn't do
anything more for them - it's not a big loss for me.

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

Finding people is not so easy, but if there were a market for this
kind of work, and the money was good enough, developers would
mysteriously become available.  Some of us are intentionally
independent consultants with a variable schedule anyway - just so that
we can work on projects that interest us which may not pay
immediately.

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

A good developer will include that as part of the paid task.

-- Jamie