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OSS Projects Offer Bounties For Features

Posted by Zonk on Tue May 10, 2005 02:57 PM
from the headhunting-with-a-keyboard dept.
Programming Software GNOME GUI Mozilla The Internet IT Technology Linux
jtowndot writes "The market for open source developers seems to be heating up. Asterisk, Gnome, Horde, and Mozilla all have bounties for desired features. Recently, Lime Wire updated its wish list to include bounties on open source development work! Similarly, i2p also released a bounty list. Is it time to consider quitting my day job to do open source development full time?"
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  • Is it just me or does "Bounty" evoke ideas of something else entirely?

    "We got the Feature. He's holed up over on the South side of the partition. Better bring your compiler."

  • you forgot mark shuttleworths... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Simarilius (665671) on Tuesday May 10 2005, @03:00PM (#12491863)
    http://www.markshuttleworth.com/bounty.html [markshuttleworth.com]

  • Not going to quit mine (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 10 2005, @03:01PM (#12491877)
    $150 buys about 3hrs of my time, most of those projects posted look to take much longer than that.

    • Re:Not going to quit mine (Score:5, Insightful)

      by un1xl0ser (575642) on Tuesday May 10 2005, @03:05PM (#12491932)
      Mod this up.

      A lot of the projects offer very little money for what they require.

      What is needed is a bounty system that users could pay into easily so the bounty could grow over time.
      • Yeah I would definitely throw into the "kitty" for a feature. I even pay for shareware if it is worthwhile. Winzip was a perfect example for a long time until XP had a built in utility for unzipping. I would definitely pay for a feature such as a linux app that scans for unencrypted wireless or a wireless with a key you have on a list and automatically connect when in range. Great for roaming and would be awesome if every time you drove through a free hotspot it could sync email.
      • This is probably the smartest thing I've heard all day. Not only would bounties be bigger, but users would have an indirect say in what features got implemented. (i.e. - More users want feature X than Y, the bounty for X grows more rapidly than Y, X gets more man-hours of coding than Y and is implemented sooner.)
        • There's a proposal [mozilla.org] about integrating this type of feature into the Bugzilla bug tracking system. The idea is that there would be an extra field on each bug page that would allow anyone to bid on that bug. One would think that the ones bidded the highest would be fixed first (after being superseded by critical bugs and the like, of course).
      • That is a really, really good idea. For a very popular project like Firefox, it could actually make it viable for someone to work on it full time.

      • Re:Not going to quit mine (Score:5, Funny)

        by duerra (684053) on Tuesday May 10 2005, @03:46PM (#12492333) Homepage
        What is needed is a bounty system that users could pay into easily so the bounty could grow over time.

        I'll give you $50 to do that.

      • What is needed is a bounty system that users could pay into easily so the bounty could grow over time.

        Ask and ye shall receive... [dropcash.com]

      • What is needed is a bounty system that users could pay into easily so the bounty could grow over time.

        Users love this idea, but FLOSS developers generally hate it. I develop my project for fun in my spare time; I don't want users dictating what I must do with my project. Don't get me wrong; I love getting ideas from users, and more often than not, I implement them. I like my hobby, I don't want it to be a job.

        Anyway, there was a huge thread [kde.org] on kde-devel on this very topic a few weeks ago, in case you
      • You mean like the Public Software Fund [pubsoft.org]?
        -russ

      • Re:Not going to quit mine (Score:4, Interesting)

        by zifferent (656342) on Tuesday May 10 2005, @07:05PM (#12494127)
        Wouldn't we then be rewarding the wrong behavior, e.g. More bugs = more $$

        Seems like a perpetual bug creating system to me.

        I might understand bounties for particularily tough programming challenges, but not for everyday bugs.

        Besides, once a price is set for open source coding, who's going to do it for free anymore?

        Paying money for everyday OS coding is switching the carrot, which has dire consequences.

        Open source works because the people who code do so, because the want to. Put a price tag on that and it does weird things to peoples brains. Basically, it changes the game.

        There was a psyc study about this kind of thing I think it was paying for grades or something, and the students lost interest once they figured out that it wasn't worth their while monetarily-wise and they stopped caring.

        When I volunteer for something, often times I find myself working harder and with more dedication than at work. I think the same thing happens with OS.

        Hey but it sounds like an awesome idea to kill off open source and it's ideals once and for all!

        Bad idea, all around.

    • Re:Not going to quit mine (Score:5, Insightful)

      by orfanotna (813716) on Tuesday May 10 2005, @04:07PM (#12492560)
      To you $150 may be chump change, but to someone in let's say Russia (where a doctor with 10 years experience gets the equivalent of $18 a month), that's pretty good money. Is there a requirement that these features have to be implemented by North American/European/Japanese programmers?

  • No (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Carewolf (581105) on Tuesday May 10 2005, @03:02PM (#12491887) Homepage
    At these bounty rates you would be starving. As a professional doing open source work for free they are almost an insult: Do people really rate our work that low?

    • Looks like OSS (Score:4, Interesting)

      by mandrake*rpgdx (650221) on Tuesday May 10 2005, @03:04PM (#12491917) Homepage
      Is outsourceing it's bounties to India then, heh. Just because me and you can't afford to live off of these bounties doesn't mean someone somewhere else couldn't.

    • Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)

      by 0x461FAB0BD7D2 (812236) on Tuesday May 10 2005, @03:07PM (#12491952) Journal
      If you're doing it for free anyway, what's wrong with getting a little gift?

      You are free not to accept it, keep it as memorabilia, or donate it to charity, as many have done in the past. People who found flaws in Knuth's books kept their $2 checks as a token of their work, rather than cashing it in.

      • Re:No (Score:4, Insightful)

        by masklinn (823351) <slashdot...org@@@masklinn...net> on Tuesday May 10 2005, @03:19PM (#12492072)
        Mod parent insightful please.
        OSS bounties are not supposed to feed you, they're supposed to be a gift-reward for your "free" work on OSS projects.

        wxWidgets [wxwidgets.org] has had "open bounties" (anyone can set a bounty for a feature or an implementation) for quite a long time now BTW

    • Professional? I figured this was aiming to get some work out of high school or college students who could use it as a way to earn cash on the side and possibly credit.

      • Yes, but the tasks these projects are hoping to accomplish are nasty and complex, and require a major measure of both genious and experience.

        Otherwise, some kid right out of school would have done it already.

        • ...the tasks these projects are hoping to accomplish are nasty and complex, and require a major measure of both genious and experience.

          What can I say to someone who misspells the word "genius?" Some of these projects are difficult, but many are just not cool or high profile enough to attract coders. Some of these projects will doubtless provide beer money for college students who otherwise may or may not have contributed to a project. They are a nice bonus for people who contribute to areas that really

    • Do people really rate our work that low?

      In a word, yes. Most clients I have tried to pick up on the side have balked at what custom software REALLY costs in terms of labor and time.

    • Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)

      by The-Bus (138060) on Tuesday May 10 2005, @03:17PM (#12492053) Homepage
      No, they just rate it low because the price they (may) be paying will be a slow/non-perfect developer. The ideal is "Hey, let's find the retired millionaire whiz and have him help out on a couple of things." In reality, the opposite extreme is you find the college aged whiz kid who disappears for three months because of terms or a big important project or he quit school.

      While not similar work, I find this all the time in the graphic design field. You find a lot of people who ask for a "custom logo for my new website" and will pay paltry sums ($20, $200) when the real value of a logo (or a good designer's time) is worth a lot more than that.

      I would imagine that putting low bounties on something is going to backfire. To someone who earns a living doing task X, spending 20 hours of their time helping out on OSS Project Y is going to be just difficult whether or not you pay. These projects need to un-monetize the incentives. Offering $100 for something that takes a lot of hours isn't going to be a big draw.

      Of course, the bigger the project the less of a monetary incentive might be necessary. Ask me to create a logo for your company and get paid $50, I'll pass. Ask me to do the next logo for Firefox 1.5, and I don't need $50, I'll do it for free. (Note I am not comparing my work to Burka & Desroches, or saying the logo needs a replacement, just using Firefox as an example).

      Of course, even with an OSS project, you can use free market concepts. The "price" of your product is people's time and resources as they download & learn your product. If you have informed a good number of people about your product and they are not willing to give their time to learn it, it may be because something better already exists. That's one reason why someone's new CD ripper project may not be that popular, or why your Java tetris clone is not being downloaded. It's not really "needed". Or at least, not yet.

      I really don't mean to troll or flame, and I don't see a problem with people getting together on something for the sake of learning and/or collaborating. But before your five team members pool together $500 to take your project to the next level, take some time to consider if it is really realyl worth it.

      • Re:No (Score:4, Insightful)

        by electroniceric (468976) on Tuesday May 10 2005, @05:24PM (#12493304)
        Of course, the bigger the project the less of a monetary incentive might be necessary. Ask me to create a logo for your company and get paid $50, I'll pass. Ask me to do the next logo for Firefox 1.5, and I don't need $50, I'll do it for free. (Note I am not comparing my work to Burka & Desroches, or saying the logo needs a replacement, just using Firefox as an example).
        I'd go a step further. $50 is less than free - it trivializes the work and reduces the non-monetary value as well. While you might well be an stellar coder or designer who contributed something incredibly valuable to the project and OSS in general, outsiders with marginal knowledge are gonna think: "$50? Either that project must have been really simple, or that coder's just not that good." Whereas before the stellar coder looked like a real saint for stepping in, now s/he has merely raised questions about his or her skills and ethics ("they paid him/her? isn't that really volunteer work?").

        Pro bono law work revolves around this: the hours the lawyers _don't_ bill are worth plenty plenty to the firm, but if the pro bono lawyer billed at rate the client could afford (e.g. $50/hour) the whole thing would be a loss to the firm. If you get down to token, "frame and put on your wall" or "have a nice dinner on us" amounts, then it's still perceived as essentially volunteer work. $50 bucks sounds ot me like you'll get something like:
        a) a college student of unknown quality and follow-thru
        b) an enterprising Indian or Chinese coder for whom the value of $50 is different.
        c) somebody desperate or out of work

        Note that Mark Shuttleworth is offering small but legitimate money for specs ($500), and real money for implementation (~$10000, and he's in S. Africa, ain't he?).

        It's nice to think that you can have a range of incentives, but the reality is that you have to be very, very careful mixing volunteer work with paid work, or people start wondering what your motivations are.

        As for LimeWire going in for this kind of work, it reinforces my impression that they don't have a clear business model. Hiring out for a couple hundred bucks (and no spec!) at a time for some bag o' features says to me that the plan is "let's make something really cool and it will sell itself", which is almost always a recipe for bankruptcy, and doubly so in a sector with an established track record of nobody making money on cool things that have already been invented.

    • Re:No (Score:3, Insightful)

      by keesh (202812)
      As a student, these kinds of bounties mean I don't need to bother thinking about getting a job during term time to pay for getting an iPod...

    • Why is everybody complaining about the rates? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Kjella (173770) on Tuesday May 10 2005, @03:26PM (#12492143) Homepage
      You can do it because you 100% want to (OSS), or because you 100% get paid (commercial). But what's wrong with there being a whole range from 1-99%? And on a simple "the higher the rates, the less people willing" basis, most of them will be on the low end. A small bonus perhaps. But what's wrong with that?

      Kjella

      • Re:No (Score:3, Interesting)

        by AKAImBatman (238306) *
        New front-end that allows control of LimeWire via a web browser [...] And for only 500 bucks?

        Actually, that sounds like one of the more reasonable requests. I could probably whip out a web frontend over the weekend. The real issue is the lack of info. What criteria have to be met in order to accomplish the goal? Would I end up wasting about 30 hours of my time to build a GUI, only to be told I won't be paid because it's missing sub-feature X? They need to have something more concrete than "Build a web fro

        • Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)

          by joeljkp (254783) <joeljkparkerNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday May 10 2005, @03:27PM (#12492154)
          Yes, but it's not quite "build us a front-end and get $500". It's "be the first to build us a front-end and get $500". If you come in second, or miss the feature set and get delayed, you very well may get nothing for your effort.

  • Are there any special rules? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 10 2005, @03:04PM (#12491916)
    I mean, someone might write code for the requested feature that works, kinda, but maybe not a good implementation or is uncommented obfuscated spaghetti code or something. How do they assertain whether or not the implementation should get the entire bounty or a portion?

  • Fast Food Industry Not Working Out For You? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by xxxJonBoyxxx (565205) on Tuesday May 10 2005, @03:05PM (#12491923)
    Hmmm...at "http://www.i2p.net/bounties" there are $450 of bounties...and $150 of it is for a "Content Distribution Network"

    I wouldn't quit your day job yet.

  • Bounties & 'Scratching an Itch' (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sv-Manowar (772313) on Tuesday May 10 2005, @03:05PM (#12491933) Homepage Journal

    In some cases at least, it seems as if these bounties are used to deal with the relative lack-of-glamour inherent in implementing some features in pieces of OSS. For the most part, its the cool hacks and features that people need individually that grab attention and get worked on. Bounties seem to redress that balance of developer attention towards less glamourous but key pieces of functionality & improvements which aren't imminently required. (although for the most part, it seems like a different class of hackers are attracted to the bounties within projects)

    Of course, putting money into OSS through these kind of means is a great use, since similar amounts spent on commercial products has a minimal/neglible effect on their development. Its also a great way for those people who cant code to contribute to the software they use, and get features they'd like to see implemented.

    • Re:Bounties & 'Scratching an Itch' (Score:5, Insightful)

      by xtracto (837672) on Tuesday May 10 2005, @05:13PM (#12493220) Journal
      Man, Personally I think one of the things that REALLY need some kind of bounty backup are the DOCUMENTATION projects... I mean, if you look at KDE help (the one that is embedded in the system) it Really Sucks(tm).

      And I am not talking only about Help Files, I am talking about Analysis and Design documents (anyone care to say what is the average of the OSS projects that have a reasonably good Requirments Document Specification or Design Specification Document.

      As a software engineer I know those are one of the things programmers really do not like to do... but they are really necessary and helpful.
  • I'm surprised it hasn't been thought of sooner.

    In a way consumers have always been able to vote on features in a natural selection sort of way (lousy software dies off, the best stuff gets a year or letters next to the title). But this allows much more direct feedback while still allowing the project leaders to control what direction the software is developed in.

    Additionally, it will perhaps put egos in check to see what users want and to be able to say you're giving them what they pay for, instead of getting upset when they feel they have a legitimate gripe about bugs in a free product and you feel they should be thankful for what they've got already (video game emulation community?)

    And on top of that maybe it would allow even stronger claims to be made if a company violates your licence -- those users aren't paying for features to be appropriated by someone who's going to steal work and close the source.

  • Make sure you agree to what is wanted! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by kjs3 (601225) on Tuesday May 10 2005, @03:08PM (#12491959)
    Anyone who intends to count on the bounty opportunities as a source of income should make sure that there is a firm understanding as to what is required to earn the bounty (if not requesting a contract of some kind). I can certainly see folks plowing a lot of effort into this only to have the people offering the bounty say "that's not what I want...no bounty for you".

  • I hope they coordinate the work. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by G4from128k (686170) on Tuesday May 10 2005, @03:08PM (#12491967)
    If there is one overriding reason that I hate MS Office, it is that it feels like the application was developed by a thousand independent programmers. Consistency between and within Office applications is very poor. Each feature seems to have its own UI logic, limitations, behaviors.

    A bounty program is great. But if it creates a thousand independent bolt-on features, it will suck. Perhaps some high-level architect in each project can create some stub classes or documentation that define exactly what the bounty-earning feature must do and how it should conform to a set of UI guidelines.

  • Bounties Always for Adding Features (Score:5, Insightful)

    by phidipides (59938) on Tuesday May 10 2005, @03:09PM (#12491978) Homepage
    One thing I've noticed about free software that differs vastly from the projects I've worked on in the commercial world is that with free software there is usually a push to do something right, even if it means waiting a while for a feature. With the bounties I've seen thus far, the mentality seems to be the commercial "do it as quickly as possible" idea. Granted, a lot of the bounties are for stuff no one really wants to do, so something is probably better than nothing, but it might also be nice to have rewards for those who do things well.

    Tasks like removing dead code, simplifying existing code, etc are tasks that the commercial world seldom does with its software ("if it ain't broke...") but it's something that keeps open source code maintainable. It might be a good idea to set up some of these bounties in terms of rewards, such that projects could once a year give something to people who not only added features to a project, but who improved the quality of a project. The bounties going out now are great, but expanding them to support quality and innovation would be really, really great.
  • This is a sign of what supporters of Open Source have been saying - that real companies are getting real value by using open source. It is cheaper for them to pay for a feature to be added to some open source software than to have proprietary software developed to their specifications. Licenses like GPL make it compulsory for those companies to contribute those changes back to the community, but unless you're in the software business this is really not a disadvantage at all. Open source lets you pay less to get the features you need and *still* reap the Public Relations benefits of having "contributed to the community". Sounds like a CEO's dream!

    • This is a sign of what supporters of Open Source have been saying - that real companies are getting real value by using open source. It is cheaper for them to pay for a feature to be added to some open source software than to have proprietary software developed to their specifications. Licenses like GPL make it compulsory for those companies to contribute those changes back to the community, but unless you're in the software business this is really not a disadvantage at all.

      I would have to disagree wi

  • A Few Questions About This (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ultimabaka (864222) on Tuesday May 10 2005, @03:22PM (#12492100)
    I'm not a CS grad, nor do I have any programming knowledge at all, but as a college graduate with no job, seeing this article raises a few questions for me: (I'm in a different field but with a similar predicament)

    (1) How do the taxes on these "bounties" work out? Are you considered an independent contractor with your own 1199, or do payroll taxes kick in?

    (2) Can CS grads who can't find jobs now use open source projects as a basis of experience, and can they not put the experience on their resume? Before, saying "I helped program XYZ chunk of Firefox" didn't really seem to mean too much on a resume, since there was no one over there you could ask to verify this. But now, if someone over there is willing to pay you cash, is there now a paper trail involved? i.e.: Can you now put down ABC's name on your resume as a reference if his payroll office paid you to build that XYZ chunk of Firefox? If you now could, this option could definitely help a lot of the unemployed CS people gain valuable experience.

    Granted, I may not know what I'm talking about, but I'm just wondering. A lot.
    • IMO, Your best bet would be to incorporate (also serves to protect you in contractual agreement) and file your taxes for your income through that. LLC would allow you to limit your tax liability.

  • Along the same lines with MythTv (Score:4, Informative)

    by Frying Ferret (557022) on Tuesday May 10 2005, @03:35PM (#12492228)
    Along the same lines, a new company LxM Media http://lxmsuite.com/ [lxmsuite.com] has started up. They will be offering data services for MythTv http://mythtv.org/ [mythtv.org] as well as paying the Myth developers. From what I undstand, you pay $5/month, and you get bounty points to spend durring the month by putting them towards a specific feature or plugin. They will then pay the myth developer who implements the most popular function.

  • Missing the point? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jsebrech (525647) on Tuesday May 10 2005, @03:39PM (#12492264)
    Aren't these bounties missing the point?

    It seems to me the biggest lacking in OSS is not the featureset, it is the usability of that featureset. Take gimp for example. It's an excellent image editor. It has every feature I need. And yet I keep getting drawn back to photoshop when I need to get real work done, because gimp is such a PITA to use (less so than it used to be admittedly, but still not anywhere near what it could be).

    This pattern for me is repeated over and over in almost all OSS projects. The few open source products I use on a daily basis and like are all centrally designed, with one person, or a few people, dictating the entire user-visible interface, like with firefox.

    The total lack of usability progress in the vast majority of OSS projects is what made me give up on linux on the desktop. Yeah, it's fine to tinker, and yes, it does anything you need. But to get real work done it just gets in my way.

    I don't mean to flame-bait, but that's my honest opinion. And I think if someone really wants to promote open source software, they are better off investing their resources in convincing projects to appoint design czars who have absolute control over the user-visible part of the software. Even a poorly done single-person design is still better than a methodically executed design by committee. These bounties for me are missing the point, and won't really matter in the end.

    Anyway, imho ofcourse.

  • to answer your question (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 10 2005, @03:43PM (#12492304)
    "Is it time to consider quitting my day job to do open source development full time?"

    One word.....YES!

    On a totally unrelated note, could you please provide me with the contact info for your company's hiring manager?

  • Check out http://fundable.org ... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pjkundert (597719) * on Tuesday May 10 2005, @05:04PM (#12493133) Homepage
    ...it's a mechanism for organizing "all or nothing" funding for any venture (including funding of Open Source development projects: http://fundable.org [fundable.org]

    This really is one of the most interesting things I've seen developed on the 'net in a long, long time.

    It has, of course, heaps of utility beyond just funding development of pet projects...

    • Re:No (Score:4, Insightful)

      by FidelCatsro (861135) <<fidelcatsro> <at> <gmail.com>> on Tuesday May 10 2005, @03:41PM (#12492287) Journal
      No but they add up to a great party and a free gift to celebrate the completion of a job well done ,that you would of perhaps done for nothing anyway had you known about it .
      Its more a nice congratulatory thing rather than something you do to pay your way .
      Also come to think about it , in some parts of the world these rewards are a rather hefty insentive .for example in romania the average monthly wage is about 265.03 euro/US$353.70.(source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wik i/Romania [wikipedia.org]) so an 100 USD insentive is a rather nice bonus , and 500 for a larger project(limewire as the example) is nearly 2 months average wage

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