Bounty Program

This page collects ideas for a potential bounty program within GnuCash.

The idea is to announce bounties on specific commonly requested features. The bounties will be on the order of $100 or $200.

Features to be eligible for bounties

The requested features or annoying bugs can be selected from those feedback sites:

• http://gnucash.uservoice.com/
  • Contains currently 90 ideas;
  • The votes from the user give a clear ranking (similar to a scrum back-log), but the specifications are mostly rather vague and unclear.
• https://bugzilla.gnome.org/browse.cgi?product=GnuCash
  • Contains currently approx. 600 bugs + 350 enhancement requests. Specifications for bugs are normally rather clear. Specs for enhancement requests vary; some are clear, some are not.

Open questions before running a bounty program

• Who decides on the general features that will be put a bounty on?
• Who decides on the per-feature bounty amount? This requires some estimation of the effort needed for the implementation of that feature, which means it will require development knowledge.
• Who is eligible to do work on a bounty?
• Is there some sort of "claiming" or "reservation" of a bounty in case a developer is actively working on it? How do we handle competing development offers on the same bounty, and who will make the relevant decisions in those cases?
• When is a feature "finished"? Who will make the final decision about whether a feature is finished and the bounty can be claimed? This decision ideally could involve somebody who was asking for this feature in the first place. How do we handle competing implementations?

General set-up of a bounty program

Other people have thought about running a bounty program in their software project as well:

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1276672/what-bounty-sites-do-other-open-source-projects-use
• http://live.gnome.org/BountiesDiscussion

External bounty web sites

The following websites offer some sort of bounty management for specific feature requests.

http://nextsprocket.com/

• The user interface is rather easy and straightforward. Multiple users can join their donation to increase the bounty on specific tasks.
• However, there doesn't seem support for management of multiple potentially competing offers.
• Also, there doesn't seem to be a status management such as "Is this bounty being worked on by any developer?" and so on.
• Payment seems to happen directly "from the task rewarder to the solution provider". 3% commission is charged.
• The site seems somewhat active. The site seems to be located in the U.S. (Irvine, CA).
• Unfortunately, the web forms seem rather buggy: When entering a new task in a Firefox 3.6, the entered details keep disappearing. Such as, the selected license keeps jumping back to "MIT" when I chose "GPL v2".

http://cofundos.org

• The site seems rather old and not very active (but there seems to be one recent task). It seems to have a rather sophisticated process for the management of task assignments: There is a structured requirement list; they can be commented on one by one. Multiple users can join their donation for specific tasks. A solution provider can tell his offer how much money he expects to implement the solution. The users can vote which offer to accept. Before a specific solution provider is chosen, there is a period of a "call for competitive offers" of three weeks (huh?). After that, a specific solution provider works on the implementation. All users will then vote whether the requirements are fulfilled. Votes are weighted by the donated money. The site is located in Germany.

http://www.fossfactory.org/

• The site seems rather recent, but still only with little activity. There is a structured requirement list. There does not seem to be support for voting which solution provider to choose. There does not seem to be a voting process to determine whether the task has been completed.