Bounties

There are a few different takes on how to use bounties to encourage work on specific projects, or to share support from specific organizations.

Specific ideas:

• Bounties for awesome (highlighting specific projects/problems)
• Summer of Content (projects and mentors)
• Bounties for coding projects needed

Background

Past project experiences

Sources for bounty info: Google for trac bounties

• libsecondlife Bounties - offers USD and Linden-dollars

• Adium Bounties

• Tinymail Bounties (none currently)

• Dr Queue Bounties (Wiki-based none currently)

• Symfony Bounties

• http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/dev/2007-April/thread.html#4186

• Gnome bounties (archive, no longer done)

What to consider: rules, eligibility, project length, bounty size, incremental updates

This is something that's been done by CodeWeavers for the wine project, mostly by corporations who wanted certain features. Legal Aid Manitoba had CodeWeavers make their application Childview work on wine for $2,000. Walt Disney paid them for work as well.

Issues

It is hard to gauge the effect offering bounties will have on a development community, especially one such as OLPC that relies on some sort of intrinsic motivation for development. Louis Villa wrote crowding out of intrinsic motivations, a review of literature related to the effects of offering/charging money in certain situations, specifically in relation and response to GNOME's bounty program (Archive.org link, program is no longer active).

Maemo developers discussed bounties (referencing Villa's blog entry).

Notes

• Pidgin: (from #pidgin on freenode):

14:53 < erikg> is there a bounty program in effect for pidgin development?
14:54 < ``Cube> erikg: I wouldn't go for that. A friend of mine once took one for 
                1,500$ only not to receive the bounty after finishing the plugin
14:58 < erikg> ``Cube: wow.
14:58 < erikg> ``Cube: do you know anyone who's gotten one?  or is it just vapor.
14:58 < ``Cube> erikg: vapor?
14:59 < ``Cube> oh well no, I'm sorry, but I know there definitely are some 
                bounties  for adium (I know that wasn't your question, but might 
                help you out)
14:59 < Err> I don't know what ``Cube is talking about (and have doubts that he 
             does, either), but pidgin does not have an official bounty program
14:59 < ``Cube> Err: yea, that's the problem: not official
15:00 < erikg> adium.  yes
15:00 < Err> that's not the problem - the problem is that nobody ever draws up 
             contracts for these things, which is the only way you can 
             realistically expect not to get robbed

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