There are many ways to contribute to Eclipse. Companies can become members and individuals can spend their time or/and donate some money (and become a Friend of Eclipse). It’s up to the Eclipse Foundation what to do with the money. Up to now the Eclipse Foundation has done a pretty good job and your money has been spent well.
If you are interested in resolving a special bug then you could wait until someone fixes it, do it yourself or hire someone to do it for you. But if the bug is too big then probably nobody will fix it and the bug will stay unfixed forever. For example bug 8009 has existed for more than 9 years and has more than 200 votes. In a comment James Roome promised to pay $100 if someone will fix the bug and Lars Sonchocky-Helldorf raised it up to $150. I like the idea of bug bounty, in particular if it will be possible to spend also small amounts of money and on the following conditions: The money should be paid into a trust account and if the bug is not fixed in a specified period of time, the payer decides what to do with the money: pay back or donate.
Even though the idea seems not to be very new, I didn’t find a related bug so I filled bug 309536. I’m looking forward to the Bounty button. $-)
April 16, 2010 at 22:37 |
Re bug 8009, the good people have a serious problem: the bug does not contain a clear description of the wanted behavior!
So… I can only expect some of the contributors will get very disappointed in the end when they see the result…
April 20, 2010 at 20:40 |
I’m personally convinced that directly mixing Open Source involvement and money is dangerous. I really liked the podcasts which is linked here which also covers this topic http://www.vogella.de/blog/2010/02/23/predictably-irrational-2/
April 20, 2010 at 22:52 |
Thx for the link. Very interesting podcast.
At Eclipse, OpenOffice, etc. many (or most?) developers are paid for their Open Source work. And what’s about the problem Andrei describes here: https://bugs.eclipse.org309536#c3 ?
Do you prefer gifts/SWAG instead of money like in the “Schreibwettbewerb” of the German Wikipedia (see http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Schreibwettbewerb#Preise)?
April 20, 2010 at 21:37 |
I do not think the open source world needs merchandising/commercialization of software defects, in fact, it never did, just review how the open source idea evolved: its main driving motivation was not to be monetary paid for fixing an error.
April 20, 2010 at 22:55 |
I think getting paid for OpenSource work is different then a bounty for tasks. Also the podcast shares this opinion. It is like the example voluntary work vrs. getting a little bit money. You either get real money to work on something ( which is ok) or no money (which is also ok). A little money is just offending.
April 20, 2010 at 23:11 |
But why we should not collect “real money” from a couple of companies and individuals? To avoid the offending effect there could be a minimal bounty limit.
September 8, 2010 at 19:36 |
[...] projects and people). Maybe, some time in future you can not only spend money on a fee but also pay upfront to make a specific feature become true or bug become fixed at Eclipse. I’m dreaming of a bright future when these honor and donate systems will become [...]