[asterisk-dev] Bounty Posts

[Tilghman Lesher]

On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 11:26 AM, David Duffett <dduffett at digium.com> wrote:

> Hello there,
>
> We've had a number of requests to post bounties for Asterisk development
> work on this list.
>
> In the past, bounty and job posts have been confined to the Biz list.
>
> Some make the point that the kind of people on this list (those concerned
> with the development of software) probably never look at the Biz list, and
> therefore posting a bounty for some dev work on the Biz list in not a
> useful thing to do.
>
> Others make the point that this list is specifically for discussions
> around the development of the project, and that anything outside of that
> should therefore not be allowed.
>
> What do you think?
>
> Should bounties for specific tasks like bug fixes, etc. be posted in the
> Dev list?
>

Bounties honestly make no sense whatsoever on any list.  By definition, a
bounty is an amount of money less than the cost of developing a feature,
such that only with a number of people posting additional monetary support
for such a feature will it reach someone's threshold for spending the time
to develop that feature.  On the other side of that, I've developed
features for others for free, for no other reason than the problem
interested me. So in either case, the posting of the bounty makes no
immediate difference to anyone as to whether a feature is developed or not.
 What makes more sense is a clearinghouse of some sort, where people
wanting features post them, along with how much they're willing to pay to
see said feature developed, and as soon as a number of people post enough
to fund that request, it gets taken up by somebody.  Or contrarily, the
feature is added by somebody who is interested in the problem but isn't
motivated by the money.

A list generally has an immediacy to it that simply doesn't meld with the
patience required (time for others to add to the bounty) for the first type
of developer and is utterly irrelevant to the second.

-Tilghman
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