(ok, lame title, but i love that story.)
anyways, every once in a while some pops up the idea of bounties being a way to push forward open source development. i'm one of those who approach bounties with a dose of scepticism, and occasionally that scepticism is reinforced. i've always been wary of bounties because i don't believe they foster the sort of long term care or quality of work necessary for larger projects, and are hard to make large enough for simpler problems to justify them.
anyways, dave neary wrote up a really interesting article detailing a $30,000 bounty offered for work on the gimp that didn't work out. more importantly, he notes why it didn't in hopes that we can learn from the episode.
sometimes it is as important to document our misteps as it is to document our successes. something about history and not repeating it or something deep like that.
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Forget bounties. They turn open source software upside down and all the motivations and advantages for doing it. I saw that interesting thread on bounties on one of KDE's mailing lists in the past, and it was interesting I saw the same conflict of interests as Dave Neary has described.
You've also got the potential for huge conflicts as the bounties and the projects grow. If someone is getting paid a fair bit of money for some feature, and someone else is doing something that is much harder, off their own initiative, but isn't then why shouldn't everyone be paid a bounty? Really, if you're going to potentially lose people like Anne-Marie Mahfouf over it as well what on Earth is the point?
I mean, if it is going to take bounties to fund some development on a piece of open source software those bounties need a realistic, long-term and viable way of funding themselves. The only realistic way of doing that in the long term are through things called software licenses.......
You can only go so far until you come full-circle back to the very same issues. I would argue that if you need too many bounties or incentives on what should be core development activities, not icing on the cake, then you need to look at what's wrong with your software. I think spending any money on getting developers together is a far, far better idea as Dave wrote at the end.
another 'agains' lies in psychologie (sorry i happen to study it) - in a phenomenon called "cognitive dissonance". you might have heard about it.
it is a 'dissonance' between cognitions: if you do something and think something else, for example.
lets say you hate war, but you're a soldier. that won't work out. your mind gets confused: i'm agains war, but i happen to be involved quite a bit. so - you resolve this by telling yourself you where forced to join the army, OR you tell yourself war has its positive sides. you act to decrease the dissonance.
you can acutally use this when trying to collect money for a good cause. ask ppl first to sign a petition to support you. they'll do it. then ask for money. because they just signed and supported you, its harder for them to say no - they support you, but don't want to give money?
now in free software, ppl spend lots of time on writing code. they like it, and if they don't (everyone is frustrated now and then) - they will tell themselves they do, because they don't get paid. now start paying them - they will like it less, *because* they recieve money.
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