Bounties and the GIMP

November 28, 2005 10:20 pm Dave Neary gimp

Finally getting this off my TODO list…

A few years ago, bounties became a popular way to try to get features written for free software programs. “I don’t have time or skills to offer”, the logic went, “but I have some money, and perhaps that’ll raise the priority of what’s important to me for some young student out there”.

The idea is sound, as far as it goes. Ximian pioneered it in GNOME, LinuxFund was founded on the principle.

Mark Shuttleworth has also offered bounties for a large number of projects, including a little-known offer of $30,000 to the GIMP project. I have written up the story of that bounty. I’m hoping that we can all learn something from it.

One Response

  1. Sven Neumann Says:
    December 1st, 2005 at 11:33 pm

    That is in my opinion a rather poor analysis of what has happened and what situation we are currently in. I rather see it like this:

    From the point on that Daniel dissapeared, the bounties have been dead and there was nothing that we could have done about that. Your summary puts it like there would have been an offer on the table all the time. But there wasn’t. There was a deal between Mark and Daniel and that deal had failed. It would have been wrong to assume that there was still a
    valid offer at this point. Without clearly defined milestones, there are no bounties.

    We are still in the very same position that we have been over the last years. If we think that bounties are a good idea, we just need to make a detailed plan, set up a number of well-defined goals and proclaim bounties. There is money available that we could use for it and we can still approach
    Mark or anyone else and ask for financial support. Nothing has changed with respect to that.