This topic was brought up during April's Meet Up. I'm posting a discussion here to get more input.
Mission of the Bounty Site
- Allow non-developers to get the functionality they need for their Drupal sites.
- Reward developers for the hard work they contribute to Drupal.
I propose a website be created where people can submit requests for project development which are associated with community driven bounties.
With this system, the person making the project request will donate a certain amount depending on how important the completion of the development work is to them. In addition, other people can add donations to increase the bounty if they would also like to see the development work completed. At this point, the money is held by a escrow service until someone completes the development work. Whoever finishes the development work, gets the money.
The project request will correlate to Drupal's issue tracker. To make a request users will need to make an issue on drupal.org and then create a bounty for the issue on dbounty.com.
The bounty payment will be made to whoever coded the patch which the drupal.org project/module maintainer accepts and commits to the project. This will leave quality assurance to the maintainer, who would insure the code is not poorly written. Once the issue correlating to the bounty has been closed for 2 weeks, the developer will be paid.
This bounty system will be useful for community members like myself who would like functionality which doesn't yet exist, but don't have development skills to do it ourselves.
For example, I might submit a project request for "Inline Views in the Diff module" (#324811: Inline diff?) with $50 donated to the bounty. Perhaps $50 is enough for a developer to start working on the project; But I assume it won't be. So the request sits unanswered. That is until other members start donating. The bounty increases to $60, then $80. Finally, when it reaches $95, a developers accepts the challenge and begins coding until the request is met. Upon completion of the work, the developer will be paid $95.
What do you think? Is a system like this feasible? Is it good for the Drupal community?
Comments
Monetizing Linux
Linux Sucks! Let fix it!
http://lunduke.com/?p=429
A presentation on the problems of linux and the need to fund development.
Miro - Adopt-a-Line
Below is an interesting attempt for an open source project to monetize their project.
https://www.getmiro.com/adopt/
I have good news : Drupal patch crowd funding platform
@philbar I have good news for you and everyone who is interested.
I can not believe how close to your description is what already done!
Judge for yourself: service of Drupal patch crowd funding.
Exactly! Issues are being imported from drupal.org (of course, having a link to original issue) every time they get updated.
Indeed. That is how it works.
Here you are a link to the first Drupal patch crowd funding platform : http://www.patchranger.com
How does it work? - an article, containing an easy to understand explanation of what is going on.
Why is it free? - description of our business model.
Multiple contributors
Often patches have multiple contributors... one person starts it, it gets reviewed, bounced back, that contributor gets busy, someone else takes it on. Rinse. Repeat. A lot. The reviewers of the patch also provide a lot of value in the process.
I'm all for letting project contributors getting some $$ for their work ;) but doing so "fairly" will likely be tricky. Typically, those who have "contributed" the patch will have their name on the commit (at least for core). I don't know how accurate these are though. Also, if one person did 95% of the work but several others contributed as well and got their names on the commit, it seems a bit strange to share the bounty equally but not sure how else it could be done.
I don't know the best answer, but these are some things to think about.
Contact: https://www.hook42.com/contact
Drupal 7 Multilingual Sites: http://www.kristen.org/book
Thank you for participating
@Kristen Pol Good catch. I have created a special issue for this question, look here : http://www.patchranger.com/roadmap .
Indeed, it is unfair that so many people putting their work - but only one of them is rewarded. Let's think together what is the best way to do it.
Look at it from this side: let's consider every review as an attempt to create a final, successful patch. If so then everyone who puts his work has a real chance of winning the jackpot. Namely, if he (or she) will create a patch so that would match every best practices and all mistakes of previous reviewers are taken into account - the reward will go to him(her). That's it. We can easily reduce the number of iterations, ensure transparency and incontestability of awarding compensation by declaring such a seemingly unfair rule: bounty is going to submitter of a committed patch.
At the moment this is the best solution I can think of.
Prairie Initiative discussion
To everyone who is interested in the subject of this post I suggest to refer to the discussion within the Prairie Initiative about how to fund the Drupal development : http://groups.drupal.org/node/142779#comment-800273. I propose to continue further discussion there.