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How To Implement Brainstorm Bounties
If the number of duplicates on this idea is any indication, there are a lot of people that would like to be able to put bounties on ideas. The way a bounty works is that various people contribute to a fund for a specific idea. Then, when a developer comes along and implements that idea, he/she gets the money.
It is a great idea, in theory, but it is a challenge to implement for a number of reasons. I think that it could be done, though. Here is one possible method.
- Ideas with a certain number of votes and up are reviewed by select developers. Any ideas that are approved are opened for bounties.
- Users pay however much they would like to put on an idea to Canonical, who holds the money.
- Once an idea has a big enough bounty attached to it, a developer can claim the idea. At that point, bounties can no longer be added to. If an idea is not claimed for a certain amount of time (a year?) after being approved, users would have the option of requesting the idea is re-approved or moving their money to another idea. The claim is made by a single developer, with the understanding that he/she can use any code that already exists and request help from others, but only the original developer gets paid. Obviously the developer can do anything with that money, so it could be distributed to others, but not through Canonical.
- The developer submits an implementation. A group of developers is selected to review the implementation. If it is satisfactory, the money is transfered to the claimer (the person who implemented the idea).
I believe this approach is fair to both the developer and the users, prevents stupid wars over little things (since there is an approval process for ideas), and would be possible to implement. I certainly don’t expect this to happen any time soon, but it would definitely be great if it did.
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I don’t know how this would work everywhere, but in the US anyone can give another person up to $10K in a given year as a gift without producing any tax issues for the giver or the receiver. As long as the contributions are considered a gift then this particular issue should be OK. Some may argue that the giver is receiving a service. I beg to differ in that the giver is not the only one to receive a benefit. Everyone receives a benefit. Therefore, it would be considered a gift to everyone. This may have to be presented to Groklaw for a legal opinion.
One of the issues that can become an issue is transferring funds across borders. This may have to be declared and may be considered an export by many countries.
I’m not sure how paypal works this issue. Instead of having a company like Cononical involved in this part, I think that something like a paypal account could be used for a given project and the bounty would go in there.
I also think that an open source committee could be involved in organizing the bounty concept and approvals. Open source organizers seem to be very democratic and they above and beyond to work out the details of such issues. Maybe, the FOSS group could get involved in the organizing and legal advise.
Canonical != Linux
It should be run by an independent site and the code should be developed on the distro of the developers choice. Porting to other distro’s can be done by developers of that distro should they also want the functionality.
Other than that. It’s a good idea, providing the community will get behind it with enough $$$ to make it worth while.
I thought about starting a bounty site once, and while it’s a nice idea there are a lot of sticky bits to work through. For example:
- What constitutes a “finished” program for the bounty? Does the developer get paid for delivering a “stable” version of the product, or is beta good enough? Proof-of-concept?
- What happens if multiple projects are started in response to the same bounty? Who gets the goods?
- Do the users involved (that is, those who paid) get a say in either of the above, or is it solely up to Canonical? How do you deal with the backlash from contributors who feel their bounty request wasn’t answered properly? (You know this community, it’s bound to happen. Imagine something like the KDE4 debacle, only with a bounty attached).
It is indeed a great idea, in theory, and I also would like to see it happen.
Two issues you didn’t addressed :
1/ The act of transferring money from Canonical (or whoever plays the middle man) to the developer : big legal overhead and troubles. The developer should be registered as a company to get paid. And each country has his particularities. Plus I’m not sure at all how bounties from users can be legally declared in accounting.
2/ The code delivered should be accepted and maintained upstream. It’s useless to implement something if upstream won’t maintain it.