2006 / December 6^th/ Code bounties

Something interesting is happening in the open source community — at least something I’ve hadn’t noticed until recently. The idea is code bounties — put up a reward fee for specific features, and let anyone in the OSS community build that feature and collect the reward.

I ran into this most recently on Josh Goebel’s awesome pastie, a little paste resource with integrated IRC functionality. I was helping Paul from failing his classes with a little bit of PHP help and went to highlight PHP as the source code highlighter when I ran into this screen:

The idea is pretty simple: users can donate money towards a bounty to build a PHP highlighter. Hackers with some free time can then code up a fix, submit it as a patch and collect the bounty. So, for instance, if someone went and coded up a PHP highlighter, they’d get $10 right now.

The same idea has been discussed for ways to improve Rails documentation. The administrator of the project might put a bounty on improving documentation for a specific feature, and have the community build out the docs that way.

I see this kind of idea as a great way to help foster and promote open source projects, while keeping the drive to add features. I’m definitely going to be thinking about ways to incorporate this kind of idea into projects like Hemingway (open sourced) so maybe I could actually get some traction on it.

1. 

   Debbie

   February 13^th | #

   I haven’t heard about bounties for documentation before. Thats interesting, especially for a lousy coder. :)

   What do you think about coding competitions? There is one on Radforge that just opened for a new open source app, Shine Live Help.

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