Open-source bounty
An open-source bounty is a monetary reward for completing a task in an open-source software project.
Description
Bounties are usually offered as an incentive for fixing software bugs or implementing minor features. Bounty driven development is one of the Business models for open-source software. The compensation offered for an open-source bounty is usually small. Bountysource and FreedomSponsors[1] are two services that advertise bounties from multiple open-source projects.
Alternatives
When open-source projects require bigger funds they usually apply for grants or, most recently, launch crowdsourcing or crowdfunding campaigns, typically organized over platforms like Kickstarter[2] or Bountysource (since 2004 also crowdfunding[3]).
Examples
- Sun MicroSystems (now owned by Oracle Corporation) has offered $1 million in bounties for OpenSolaris, NetBeans, OpenSPARC, Project GlassFish, OpenOffice.org, and OpenJDK.[4]
- Mozilla introduced a Security Bug Bounty Program, offering $500 to anyone who finds a "critical" security bug in Mozilla.[5]
- Artifex Software offers[6] up to $1000 to anyone who fixes some of the issues posted on Ghostscript Bugzilla.
- Two software bounties were completed for the classic Commodore Amiga Motorola 680x0 version of the AROS operating system, producing a free Kickstart ROM replacement for use with the UAE emulator and FPGA Amiga reimplementations, as well as original Amiga hardware.[7][8]
- RISC OS Open bounty scheme to encourage development of RISC OS[9]
- AmiZilla was an over $11,000 bounty to port the Firefox web-browser to AmigaOS, MorphOS & AROS. While the bounty produced little results it inspired many bounty systems in the Amiga community including Timberwolf, Power2people, AROS Bounties, Amigabounty.net and many more.
See also
References
- ↑ http://www.freedomsponsors.org/
- ↑ Lunduke, Bryan (2013-08-07). "Open source gets its own crowd-funding site, with bounties included - Bountysource is the crowd-funding site the open source community has been waiting for.". networkworld.com. Retrieved 2013-08-10.
Many open source projects (from phones to programming tools) have taken to crowd-funding sites (such as Kickstarter and indiegogo) in order to raise the cash needed for large-scale development. And, in some cases, this has worked out quite well.
- ↑ "Bountysource Raises $1.1 Million for the First Crowdfunding Platform for Open-Source Software Projects". finance.yahoo.com. 2013-07-16. Retrieved 2013-08-08.
- ↑ Sun Sponsors Open Source Community $1M Innovation Award, Sun MicroSystems, archived from the original on 2008-12-19
- ↑ Leyden, John (2004-08-03), Mozilla to pay bounty on bugs, The Register
- ↑ http://www.ghostscript.com/Bug_bounty_program.html
- ↑ amiga.org – Kickstart ROM Replacement (Phase II) Assigned
- ↑ – power2people.org Kickstart ROM Replacement (Phase II)
- ↑ http://www.riscosopen.org/bounty/