BountySource

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BountySource is a collaborative project management service for use by any Open Source Software with an OSI-approved license. Like other free services and products (SourceForge, trac, bugzilla), BountySource allows for developers to track bugs and feature requests. Unlike the others, BountySource also allows for "bounties" and offers bounty integration as a focal point of its service.

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[edit] History

BountySource was started in late 2003[1] according to its domain registration data. The website was originally written in PHP, but as of March 18, 2006 it switched to Ruby on Rails.[2]

[edit] Features

[edit] Bounty

Each bug report and feature request can have a monetary bounty placed on it from any number of users. The money acts as an incentive to the developers and also helps show the development team where users think the project needs more work. BountySource currently integrates directly with PayPal and holds the money in escrow prior to the bounty being placed, this resolves the issues that developers were having in the past where individuals would "pledge" money, but it was near impossible for a developer to collect.

[edit] Subversion (SVN) Hosting

BountySource offers SVN code repository to each project. SVN allows for source code version control and is considered by many to be superior to its competitor, CVS. On May 8th, 2006[3], BountySource integrated a new custom-built SVN browser into the system.

[edit] Task Tracker

BountySource provides a custom-built task tracker. The tracker allows developers and project administrators to organize tasks into future release schdules, called roadmaps. Tasks can also be assigned to specific developers, as well as have bounties placed on them.

[edit] Content Management

The Content Management system currently uses textile markup language and a custom wiki-like system to allow for projects to have content displays as they see fit. Each project is given a subdomain on BountySource, http://PROJECT.bountysource.com/.

[edit] Open Source Releases

On May 11th, 2006, BountySource released their SVN browser, titled bsSvnBrowser, under the GNU GPL license.[4]. They have announced their intentions to open source more portions of BountySource as time goes on and the code matures.

[edit] Statistics

As of March, 2007, no system-wide statistical data has been been made public.

[edit] See also

[edit] External Links