[Mono-devel-list] Sponsoring Mono bugfixes

[Todd Berman]

On Fri, 2005-06-03 at 20:27 +0200, Martin Baulig wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-06-03 at 12:00 +0200, Luke Venediger wrote:
> 
> > What does the community think of the idea of sponsoring developers to
> > fix Mono bugs? For example, you might be developing for the mono
> > runtime and there is a bug that is preventing you from going any
> > further with your project. You could offer, say, $20 to the first
> > person that fixes the bug. The size of the "ransom" could depend on
> > the size of the bug.
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I think it's better to use bounties as a reward for doing good work (for
> instance implementing a super-cool killer-feature) rather than as a
> motivation for doing boring work.
> 
> IMHO paying someone money to fix a boring bug has the inherent danger
> that people won't fix such bugs anymore, but wait until someone sets a
> bounty on them.
> 

While I don't agree with bounties on specific bugs, I also don't agree
with what you are saying at all. No one fixes a "boring" bug for free
anyway today. There are 2 types of people fixing them

1) People who need the fix.
2) People who are payed (by Novell, Mainsoft, whoever) to fix them.

This would add a third set of contributors fixing boring bugs, people
being payed by bounties.

I highly doubt as well, that any bounty would ever be significant enough
to actually make money on. Unless you think making 20$ for the 4 or 5
hours that a easy bug would take to fix (time to write the patch, get it
reviewed, get it into the codebase) is 'good money'.

--Todd