8 January 2005

Back from Mexico.

Bounties

I spent some time last night going through the open source desktop bounties that we launched about a year ago.

Justin Wake seems to have nearly completed the Evolution/iPod synchronization bounty.

I haven’t given it a try yet, but his tarball is still available [evolution-ipod-sync-0.2.tar.bz2].

Meilof Veeningen completed the mailing list actions bounty with an Evolution plugin.

This is pretty handy for jumping to the archives for the mailing list for a particular mail you’re looking at, or for unsubscribing.

The prolific David Trowbridge built a weather data source for the Evolution calendar, so that you can have actual/forecast weather events show up in your calendar for a variety of cities.

The smiley typing bounty was completed by Jan Arne Petersen, and James Bowes claimed the default free/busy URL bounty.

A full list of all the claimed bounties so far is here. To date, we have distributed $12,200 in payments for 21 claimed bounties.

During tonight’s clean-up of the bounty web page, I eliminated several of the bounties that don’t have very much value. In most cases, this is because they are so underspecified as to be unimplementable. In two cases, the bounties were eliminated because ineligible Novell employees completed them. The eliminated bounty bug numbers are 127528 127517 127559 127524 127555 and 127543.

These eliminations freed up about $3,000. Some of this has been redistributed among the remaining, unclaimed bounties. Note in particular that the calendar publishing bounty is now worth a lot. We’ll probably create one new bounty with the remaining cash.

General Bounty System

This bounty project has been controversial for various reasons, but I think that it has led to a number of great hacks being introduced to GNOME, and has attracted some new developers to the project.

I am still in favor of the creation of a general bounty system for open source projects. The idea is to allow anyone to act on their “I’d pay $50 if someone fixed this” impulses. SourceXchange and others tried to do this years ago, but I think they were too early, and to date no one has done this well.

I think a general bounty system should start with a simple, clean interface wherein:

1. Anyone can create a new bounty, and describe it with HTML, text, images, etc.
2. People can search for bounties that already exist, and “pile” onto them by pledging additional money.
3. There is an easy mechanism for people to associate a bounty with a bug in any of the popular bugzillas. So, there’d be a way to create a freeform bounty, and a way to create a bug bounty bound to a bug in bugzilla.mozilla.org/bugzilla.gnome.org/bugzilla.kde.org, etc.

   I had been thinking that we might want to create a link from the bug to the bounty, but I think this actually would seem like spam to the people who are using bugzilla.

   Instead, we could have the bounty website periodically poll the bugs for which there are bounties and alert anyone who has pledged on that bounty if the bug status has changed.

4. There is a mechanism for people to claim bounties, and for the original bounty creator to verify that the claim is valid.

   This is an interesting matter of policy. If more than one person has pledged money against the bounty, should everyone get a say in whether or not the bounty has been completed?

The key is probably to have a very fast, simple, clean UI.

My friend Rhett Creighton has been interested in this topic. He suggested that the site be generalized beyond software, so that it can be used for things like the Ansari X Prize, James Randi’s paranormal powers challenge, and other similar things. That would be cool, but I think this should start with software.

One thing I’ve considered doing is specing something up, and then putting a bounty on someone implementing the spec.