Bounties for free software 73
Gerg sent us a quick blurb from
news.com which says
``In an attempt to jump-start XSL development, Sun Microsystems and Adobe are putting up $90,000 in bounties for independent developers who come up with specific XSL implementations''
Interesting implications. Is this the future of software
development? This actually is one of the more common questions
that people ask me about. Would a bounty system for software
really work? Would it make the suits and the hackers
happy? I don't have an answer.
Because... (Score:1)
* Pay health insurance
* Withhold taxes
* Pay other benefits and overtime
* Manage the programmer
The salary is a tiny chunk of what it costs a company to maintain a single employee. Far easier just to pay a bounty and avoid the administrative costs.
Simple, this way is far cheaper. (Score:1)
I guess you don't work in the business world.
Now $90k might seem like a lot to you, but trust me, it far cheaper than hiring people to do it.
You have bloaty overhead rates, benefits, management costs, and a hard time finding GOOD sw engineers in the valley. And don't forget projects have a real tendency to over run their schedule.
Only $90k for a completed project like this without the risk of failure is a bargain in the Valley I live in.
What are the ramifications of this?
* Companies can be more profitable.
* Move the software development overseas to places like India where the wages are low and the skill is high. My Indian friends say India has a management infrastructure problem and the government is hostile to foreign business but that can change.
* The wanna-be engineers in the valley (i.e. talently deficient) could be in for a world of hurt. Who am I kidding, as long as the Valley is still hot and management is still craving bodies to throw into the open fire, even the most lacking engineer can find a job.
- erik olson
Here's why not (Score:1)
The comments about "bountyware" bypassing all the hassles that come with employment makes me think that the gubmints must be getting a little nervous about this. They could stand to lose a lot of money and power if this concept succeeds (I think it will).
I envy the younger geeks who are just getting involved--the software industry is finally getting its act together and I'll be dead or hopelessly senile in thirty years. Damn. At least if I'm only senile I'll be able to go to work for Microsoft. I wonder if they allow employees to wear polyester and carry drool cups?
Not a financial incentive (Score:1)
Bounty is something that one can specificaly work for and somehow rely on being paid. But then the announcement should be made in public, in some clear way, so developers should be able to tell, what they actually should do to win one, and what can be expected.
Grant is something that is paid for some purpose in the expectation that something will be developed, but then it should be paid in advance. It's not a bad way to fund Open Source, and government and companies do it all the time. The down side is that competition for grants is often complex, bureaucracy-dependent and has little to do with the merit of the work done on grants.
Prize is something that is paid after the work, and prize awarding rules rarely are specific enough to leave any hope for developer that he can rely on a prize -- relying on even high announced prize will be like asking bank for a loan because he is working on a research for what he can win a Nobel Prize.
In this case the announcement is for a prize, not bounty or grant, so "financial incentive" mentioned in the article doesn't exist.
possible reason... (Score:1)
Bah! (Score:1)
money is good (Score:1)
Don't demonize money. Money is just a physical representation of "effort." I do work and trade it for something.
Just to get totally off topic....an analogy: Don't demonize Windows95. It's just a representation of commands I wish to give to the computer.
The point isn't that labour for reward is bad (at least *my* point isn't), I just think the implementation (ie the money system) is bad.
By deomonizing money, you're deomonizing someone who is doing work.
Not any more than demonizing win95 is demonizing someone for using a computer. There is always the possiblity of using another [operating] system.
Not that /. is the appropriate place for this discussion, but if "irregardless" can spawn 20 replies when talking about SMP, then why not :-)
dylan_-
--
XSL? (Score:1)
A bit of clarification. There are two parts to XSL; some people consider it to actually be two different languages.
The first part specifies transformations from XML to something else (e.g., HTML, PDF, PostScript). This is the part that you seem to be referring to, though it's actually more general than what you describe, since the resulting document doesn't have to be HTML or HTML-like.
The second part is essentially a formatting language, like CSS. You can then use the XSL transformation language to process an XML document and spit out a set of XSL formatting elements.
If money is the motivator then quality will suffer (Score:1)
Perhaps so, but at the worst we'll have a mediochre but working XSL implementation in Mozilla that can then be improved by self-motivated hackers. It would have happened eventually, to be sure, but it certainly doesn't hurt the effort to have money going into it.
bounty hunters vs. bounty coders (Score:1)
consignment. This is no different than having your boss say to you: if you don't get this done
on time, I won't pay you for your time. The only reason you would stick around is if you thought
you could do it or you were stupid.
Also following this analogy, a bounty hunter doesn't have to keep the fugitive in a jail cell
and feed it for the next 30 years. Similarly, a bounty coder wouldn't need to support it.
Bounty hunters are opportunists, I would expect the same for bounty coders.
Probably not the best way to get code written, but to get bug reports or copies of viruses
this is probably a win.
Note there is a big flaw in this analogy. A bounty hunter knows that if he/she has the fugitive,
nobody else will get the bounty. Anybody and their grandmother can write code and beat you
to the punch.
Only a few will be paid. (Score:1)
If a bounty system is to work, it probably needs a registration system of some sort, so everyone knows who is already working on the project and how long they have been working on it. This way, if there are already a few people working on a project, new people will know that they would be at a disadvantage if they started now, and perhaps they would be better off picking a different project.
Smart but what impact will it have on coding (Score:1)
Isn't there a similar deal for NTTS? (Score:1)
This is an effort to promote Java (Score:1)
bounties shmounties (Score:1)
relax a little (Score:1)
Here's why not (Score:1)
By offering a bounty, they don't have to screen programmers, hire programmers, or reject programmers. Instead, people who are interested in the project, the money, or both, can freely work on it. Sun and Adobe do not have to pay every programmer (or group) working on this project, just the winners (and runner-up for the Adobe offer).
Bounties for Software (Score:1)
What you end up with is cathedral-style development followed by bazaar-style distribution. First releases will be as buggy as any commercialware. But even the bazaared distribution isn't going to work here-- who's going to contribute bug fixes on a bountied software when they could be working toward new bounties? So not only does the initial release suffer, but post-release improvements suffer as well.
Bounties may have some benefits, but they really miss most of the advantages of OSS.
The quality of the code goes down (Score:1)
--
Four years in jail
No Trial, No Bail
*** FREE KEVIN *** [kevinmitnick.com]
No Subject Given (Score:1)
Maybe you'll want to schedule price reductions based on when you hit certain fractions of the total. You'd probably still want at least a rough guess of the volume-demand curve for your software, and you'd want to run some simulations. But the periodic price reductions would probably come to be regarded as an indication of your good faith that you really will release the source code later on.
A simplistic approach, assuming you're developing something over a long time, and catering to a market that is eager for the latest version, would be to open-source old versions based on a constant time delay (maybe six or twelve months). This would be a little like a time-compressed version of the patent system.
Bounties for Software (Score:1)
Maybe if people feel strongly about these toolsets, they can put up bounties for their release as well. In any event, I don't think the world will ever conform to anybody's ideas of how things ought to be, not mine nor yours nor RMS's. You can argue persuasively, you can explain your reasoning, and you can set a good example, but you can't really control what people do.
Can you propose an alternative to bounties, where all parties do at least as well as they do with bounties, and programmers and teams don't have an incentive to hoard tools? Nothing springs to my mind, but any such scheme would be a vast boon to OSS.
relax a little (Score:1)
(It would be nice if people could be as dispassionate about OSS principles as they are about, say, the principles of thermodynamics, like this: Yes, this is how things work, and therefore these are the actions we need to take to get what we want, and we need to know all that and act consistently with it, but we don't need to lose sleep over it.)
There are some really wonderful posts here. People are really thinking about what would happen if this became a widely-used way to finance OSS development. That's cool.
Ultimately, this being a free country, you can't control what people do (except the very crude control offered by the legal/penal system). The best thing is to argue eloquently for the ideas you think are best. People are using this as a forum to practice doing that.
Why not hire someone to do it? Here's why... (Score:1)
It could work out the same for independent consultants too. No CorpGov LLC commute, no office politics, no staying 12 hours when you got done with the project in 8hrs. An actual life just might be yours, community, family and friends! Oh my.
GNOME/Enlightenment (Score:1)
On the E side of things, E has been perfectly stable for me for the last four months, and all but perfectly stable for the last year or so. I've almost never seen E crash, and I go back to the late 13.3 days. The only times I remember it crashed, it put upa window saying that it crashed, with an option to restart. If I selected restart, E restarted, and all my apps stayed up. Why do people always pick on E? it's extremely fast, with a small theme, it's pretty small, it looks great, and has tremendous flexibility to do things the way that I want them to be done (where I is the generic I).
Step in the right direction (Score:1)
The only question is will other companies buy this? I certainly hope so.
Software bounties.. (Score:1)
Bowie
Bounties (Score:1)
Royalties better than Bounties? (Score:1)
bounties/programmer's collective (Score:1)
How about a modified bounty system: pay a large pool of remote programmers a "reasonable" base salary (it might be quite small if a programmer can sign up with more than one company) plus a bounty for achieving some programming goal. The problem is benefits. No one company will wish to pay a programmer's benefits because it would prefer to free ride on the rest. In this sense the benefits are a public good. How about a programmer's collective/cooperative to provide benefits to the group? Each member pays in (they would be willing to do so in order to share the risk of not winning a bounty), plus a small payment from each participating business.
GNOME/Enlightenment (Score:1)
er..so there.
I started writing one six months ago (Score:1)
Six months ago I started writing what I still believe to be the only XSL formatting object formatter around and I happened to output as PDF and write in Java.
Due largely to lack of time, I haven't done much in the last few months. I would have accepted $5000 to finish it!
I'm going to try and finish it now.
see http://www.jtauber.com/fop/ [jtauber.com] as well as http://www.xmlsoftware.com/xsl/ [xmlsoftware.com] for XSL-related software in general.
James