[asterisk-dev] Bounty Posts

[Tilghman Lesher]

On Tue, Jan 22, 2013 at 12:05 AM, Damien Wedhorn <voip at facts.com.au> wrote:
> On 22/01/13 05:31, Tilghman Lesher wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>
> Just my two cents worth, but I don't think you can take a commercial
> economic approach to this question.
>
> I don't think the bounty is meant to cover the cost of development, but to
> be an incentive to prioritize it. I see nothing wrong with being provided a
> cash (or beer) incentive to do a bit of work that may have been done freely
> anyway.

No, I don't see a problem with that, either, and I've accepted such,
in the past.  But in most cases, someone presented a problem to me, I
fixed the problem, and only then was money brought up.  In fact, what
research has been done on the subject suggests that an insufficient
amount of money tends to deprioritize, not prioritize, a goal.  No
money has a greater prioritization effect than a small amount of
money, paradoxically.

> If the request is to get people to contribute to the bounty, sure -biz, but
> if someone wants to incentivise a coder, this is probably the better list.

If someone wants to incentivise a coder, making them interested in the
problem is going to be far more effective.

-Tilghman