Re: Bounty for Bugs in Open Source Projects?

Laurent GUERBY wrote:
> This misses the point IMHO.
> 
> Free software gets written and FS bugs fixed even without
> money directly involved. This is a fact, it might be hard
> to grasp for some property obsessed economists, but they 
> just have wrong theories.
> 
> You're talking about full costs, but bounties are not
> here to cover full costs. They are here to provide
> a small incentive to some FS developper to focus his/her skill
> on the bounty problem instead of many other possible things.
> 
> Everyone benefits, even if the system is currently very small scale.

I think the unspoken motivation behind these questions about bounty
systems is usually that a lot of free software developers would love a
means of being paid for the work they do for nothing in their free
time at the moment - maybe even make a career out of it, if the money
was available.

But don't forget that _this_ thread was started by someone who has
a little money, who wants to offer it to developers somehow.

That doesn't in any way denigrate the successful creations of free
software.  But there are people, too, not just software projects.
People who'd like to earn a living, or at least augment their
earnings, writing free software.

There is quite a lot of software that people would like to develop,
the skill is available, the personal interest is available, and people
would like to use it, but it's _not_ being developed as free software.
The question is: how can we better bring these interests together, so
that more of it is.

-- Jamie