Ask HN: Would issue “bounties” make contributing to open source more appealing?

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • SurveyJS - Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • pyroscope

    Discontinued Continuous Profiling Platform. Debug performance issues down to a single line of code [Moved to: https://github.com/grafana/pyroscope] (by pyroscope-io)

    I'm building an open source company (https://github.com/pyroscope-io/pyroscope) where we're very upfront about intent to eventually monetize via cloud-hosted version as many open source companies do.

    We, in a way, have financial upside to people completing (some) of the issues we've posted, so sometimes it feels like it would be mutually beneficial to pass some of that through to the contributors as people contribute.

    I'm wondering... if we added a "bounty/reward" in the issue text that said we'd pay $X amount for someone to resolve the issue, would that make people more or less likely to contribute?

    On one hand it seems to go against the historic "vibe" of open-source, but on the other commercial open-source seems much more acceptable these days and would maybe be a nice bonus for the. contributor.

    Any thoughts, experience, or ideas here? Anyone have experience really incentivizing people to contribute to open source?

  • lbry-desktop

    A browser and wallet for LBRY, the decentralized, user-controlled content marketplace.

    You're saying they incentivize people to contribute to their github repo (https://github.com/lbryio/lbry-desktop/issues)?

    Or are you saying that they specifically pay people to do so?

  • SurveyJS

    Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.

  • barrier

    Open-source KVM software

    > How have I never seen a github issue where someone just puts in the issue 'I'll pay you X to do this'

    Here’s an example of that, kind of: https://github.com/debauchee/barrier/issues/109

  • All your ideas are of value for our FLOSS MOOC! I'll make sure we integrate some of these ideas in it. If you're interested and want to contribute: https://gitlab.com/mooc-floss/mooc-floss/

  • hacktoberfest-swag-list

    Multiple companies go above and beyond for Hacktoberfest, and this repo tries to list them all.

    There was a significant number of companies doing this for Hacktoberfest 2020: https://hacktoberfestswaglist.com/

  • SheetJS js-xlsx

    📗 SheetJS Spreadsheet Data Toolkit -- New home https://git.sheetjs.com/SheetJS/sheetjs

    We looked into doing this with our main open source project (https://github.com/sheetjs/sheetjs) years ago and ultimately decided against putting bounties for issues.

    Fixing small typos and other "menial tasks" can be funded, but for reasonably popular projects there are plenty of people who will do that work for the resume bump.

    That leaves non-trivial problems for bounties. Most of those issues are much deeper, requiring a significant time investment for development and testing. Once you are talking about X0 or X00 hours, a fair bounty starts crossing into the $Y0,000 range. At that scale you might as well just hire a full time person to do the work.

    What we found effective was paying experts in other areas to help with demos. For example, the SheetJS x Google Sheets demo (https://github.com/SheetJS/sheetjs/tree/master/demos/google-...) was written with the help of the author of the drive-db module. You will probably find lots of small projects unrelated to the open source issues that you could fund.

  • Rocket.Chat

    The communications platform that puts data protection first.

    As someone who doesn't have enough technical expertise to build the features in open source projects an active donor to projects I support this kind of idea. I wouldn't call it a bounty though, more like gofundme for certain features. In some cases i'd pay $1000+ for some features to be built, and ideally others would join me.

    Here's an example of a feature I'd want to financially contribute to that has a lot of support: https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat/issues/2049

    From my perspective it is the killer feature that enables me to switch from slack, saving my business hundreds of dollars a month. I can't just "hire a developer to do it" - the best deal would be if one of the existing contributors did it.

    Also, some open sources struggle with funding and priorities - I'm sure there's features out there where the community would commit tens of thousands of dollars (Kickstarter style)

  • WorkOS

    The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  • quadratik

    Free and open source software for easy self-hosted quadratic funding!

    If you want to raise some funds for specific issues, try https://github.com/uav4geo/quadratik. We had some good successes with OpenDroneMap using this model. https://fund.webodm.org

  • awesome-software-patreons

    A curated list of awesome programmers and software projects you can support!

    There have been countless FOSS-centric bounty sites since the late 1990s. They never took off in a significant way and now people are using subscription-based platforms like Patreon and Liberapay: https://github.com/uraimo/awesome-software-patreons/

    I guess in hindsight one could say that bounties are too messy while a subscription-based approach is much clearer (less managing overhead etc.).

    Quoting from https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/market-research/history/software

    "Many bounty sites have been tried over many years. Some sites that have come and gone: The Free Software Bazaar, CoSource, Fundry, Public Software Fund, BountyOSS, BitKick, COFundOS (which alled users to place bounties for new applications as well as for changes to existing programs), Opensourcexperts.com, Donorge, Bountycounty, Bounty Hacker, microPledge, FundHub (some unrelated site uses that name now, not surprisingly), GitBo, Catincan, DemandRush, and Open Funding (broken though the main domain openinitiative.com still exists) — and probably others we never discovered. GNOME and Launchpad each made attempts at supporting bounties but that never came to anything substantial. FOSS Factory (which is still live but has had no activity for years) bothered writing their own essay on the history of other failed bounty sites."

    You might also want to check out https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/market-research/other-crowdfundi...

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