Ask HN: Would issue “bounties” make contributing to open source more appealing?
This model worked really well for me and several others some time ago - but the conditions for that may not translate to your project and other not-so-popular ones.<p>I loved finding feature requests for rocket chat on bounty source years ago - this gave use lowly users the ability to crowdsource how ideas should be implemented and crowdfund them. I found many other people who really wanted to add the option for &#x27;login without email addy or registration&#x27; and to hook that login into permissions options already established.<p>Together we put in over $600 I think, which I believed would be a pretty simply code chunk to add. That amount got the attention of a coder who knew the rocket chat system and decided he could get it done in a short enough time to make it good money per hour for him and he put it together and it went to code review and they added it!<p>I started to imagine how powerful this could be for wordpress and similar - but some story broke about bounty-source that made it fade - like said elsewhere in thread <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;user?id=neolog" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;user?id=neolog</a> , don&#x27;t recall what it was at this moment either.<p>With wordpress you can kind of do this - but it&#x27;s less crowdsourcing and more try your luck with codeable or freelancer or whatever - and you won&#x27;t get a code review from the core WP team, and it likely won&#x27;t become part of &#x27;core&#x27; so you&#x27;ll have to maintain updates, breaking code and security and crap all on your own - but it&#x27;s kind of an option nonetheless.<p>I have really wanted to do this with matrix&#x2F;synapse &#x2F; fluffy&#x2F;element - as there are important mods I think should be implemented immediately - and they already have a roadmap with priorities and those are gonna take a while.<p>So I think for popular projects with lots of users it can be a boon for features being developed and it could work out good for everyone. Your project may not have enough people with eyes on for the same kind of thing. Maybe hiring a contractor that gets subcontractors to take care of the small things for you would be better at this time?<p>I&#x27;d love to see a bountysource reborn with variable options, and glad to see others mention similar portals that I am eager to take a look at.<p>If I had a big project going, I&#x27;d like to be able to make an &#x27;official page&#x27; on a portal like so that could setup revenue splits as well - as I can imagine it would be easy to get overwhelmed with new code chunks being sent and it would take time and money to review security and how things in this new chunk could affect other things and all that.<p>I&#x27;d also put up a page where people could vote a thumbs up, as well as the vote with held in escrow dollars that I enjoyed with b-source time ago..<p>I&#x27;d consider giving users who bought a premium copy or pay for premium cloud or whatever to get 20 &#x27;super likes&#x27; per renewal so they could collectively vote up feature requests.. often I&#x2F;we&#x2F;I notice others, are quite surprised at what they users want most while we work on features we think are most important.<p>last note - with you coming out with a premium version in the future - as a &#x27;bounty coder&#x27; or funder - I might feel slighted paying or coding for open source with the premium version coming at a later time - I think it&#x27;s important to note that boldly so no one is surprised by it - and offer a guarantee that code will still be available - like wordpress does. I&#x27;d hate to spend time or money on something that was set to take advantage of that and then wall off and drop everyone ala fbook and google with xmpp kind of situation.