Introduction

Many OSS projects have developer bounty systems:

• freeswitch
• pfSense
• Funambol

Here are a few links to bounty discussions elsewhere:

• ​http://live.gnome.org/BountiesDiscussion lists some interesting thoughts.
• ​http://nextsprocket.com/ looks like a relatively active site for opensource bounties in general.
• ​https://www.bountysource.com/

Origin of the idea

This idea originated from ecrist and was discussed first in an IRC meeting. It was discussed on the -devel mailinglist soon afterwards:

• ​http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.network.openvpn.devel/3707

Summary

Here is a summary of the ideas formed in the IRC meeting and the email exchange that followed.

• Rationale
  • Would allow users to prioritize feature additions through compensation.
  • Would help achieve greater interest of developers in users' requests and needs.

• Implementation ideas
  • Bounty funds would be setup and maintained by a non-developer (ecrist?) and held. This assures payment upon completion and assures feature is completed before bounty is paid.
  • Multiple users could fund a bounty for intensive feature additions which may warrant higher payouts.
  • Developers setup up accounts and 'claim' tasks
  • After a specific timeout a task becomes available to another user, unless progress can be shown
  • Payment could be divided into multiple phases to motivate developers to maintain the code they've written. For example:
    • 50% payout for a commit to main tree
    • 25% upon release in production (provided bugs are fixed/etc)
    • 25% 6 months after release (provided bugs are fixed/etc)
  • The above would also guarantee the quality of the code
  • Handling monetary transactions
    • Could be handled through an external foundation / organization (e.g. ​http://www.spi-inc.org/projects)
    • We could establish our own foundation for the purpose
  • Licensing and copyright