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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.
from the headhunting-with-a-keyboard dept.
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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WANTED: Dead or Alive (Score:5, Funny)
"We got the Feature. He's holed up over on the South side of the partition. Better bring your compiler."
Re:WANTED: Dead or Alive (Score:5, Funny)
The quicker picker-upper? Captain Bligh?
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Re:WANTED: Dead or Alive (Score:4, Funny)
Boba Fett: He's no good to me non complient.
Darth Vader: He will not be permanently proprietery.
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Re:WANTED: Dead or Alive (Score:3, Funny)
The CEO in a row boat.
Some times you feel like a nut... (Score:3, Funny)
...some times you don't.
For those of you who don't get this, it's a reference to an old TV commercial for Bounty/Mounds chocolate candy.
Re:WANTED: Dead or Alive (Score:3, Funny)
you forgot mark shuttleworths... (Score:5, Informative)
Not going to quit mine (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not going to quit mine (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Not going to quit mine (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not going to quit mine (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Not going to quit mine (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not going to quit mine (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not going to quit mine (Score:5, Funny)
I'll give you $50 to do that.
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Re:Not going to quit mine (Score:3, Informative)
Ask and ye shall receive... [dropcash.com]
Re:Not going to quit mine (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Public Software Fund? (Score:3, Informative)
-russ
Re:Not going to quit mine (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Not going to quit mine (Score:5, Insightful)
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No (Score:4, Insightful)
Looks like OSS (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:No (Score:4, Insightful)
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
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Re:No (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:No (Score:3, Insightful)
Otherwise, some kid right out of school would have done it already.
Re:No (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:No (Score:3, Insightful)
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)
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.
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Re:No (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re:No (Score:3, Insightful)
Why is everybody complaining about the rates? (Score:4, Insightful)
Kjella
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Re:No (Score:3, Interesting)
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)
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Are there any special rules? (Score:3, Interesting)
Fast Food Industry Not Working Out For You? (Score:3, Insightful)
I wouldn't quit your day job yet.
Bounties & 'Scratching an Itch' (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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.
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This is the future of software development. (Score:3, Interesting)
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)
I hope they coordinate the work. (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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.
Because It Makes Economic Sense For The Sponsors (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Because It Makes Economic Sense For The Sponsor (Score:3, Insightful)
I would have to disagree wi
A Few Questions About This (Score:3, Interesting)
(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.
Re:A Few Questions About This (Score:3, Informative)
Along the same lines with MythTv (Score:4, Informative)
Missing the point? (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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)
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)
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
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