[oldgregg]

It would be nice if github made it easy for people to assign a $ bounty to every issue and when it's marked complete payouts are automatic. There are a bunch of issues in various open source projects where I would easily drop $100 on a bounty.

[lkbm]

I believe this is what bountysource.com is for. I haven't tried it, though, and I'm not sure how completion is evaluated.

Seems problematic to let the bounty-poster decide if something is completed, but also to put it on a third party to put in the time to verify for various pieces of software they might not be familiar with (and worse to put it on the second party who implements).

[j_s]

Three days ago:

BountySource suspended from GitHub | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15747328

Useful discussion on the concept there; they were temporarily suspended for not supporting opt-out.

Whisper Systems supports auto-Bitcoin for suspended pull requests. https://signal.org/blog/bithub/

[Mz]

This is potentially a great idea. It doesn't necessarily have to be a github feature. It could be a third party platform, kind of a Patreon or Kickstarter for open source bugs.

But I think the platform would need to be scalable in some way. Maybe no one will fix it for your $100, but maybe if the bounty were crowd funded, it would get fixed when the bounty got high enough to be worthwhile for the amount of time and effort involved.

When I was an active participant on Cyburbia, the site owner was paying for hosting out of pocket and he was resistant to commercializing it and was equally resistant to taking donations. He talked about commercialization as "becoming a sellout" and taking donations as "I don't want to do a PBS style begathon annually." He worked for the government and seemed just unable to wrap his head around good monetization.

People would complain that the site was slow and kludgey. As it got more popular, the level of hosting service he could afford was not really meeting demand. He would crab at complainers that they needed to be more appreciative of the free service that he was paying for out of pocket and make it clear he could not afford more.

I felt there was an obvious solution: Post a page saying it takes $x to cover better hosting for a year. I can't afford that out of pocket. If you want to see site performance improve, kick in a few bucks. When it hits $y, I will upgrade the hosting service. Then point people to that page when they complained.

I see a lot of potential for your idea. It could be a means to turn complaints into a money stream to help improve open source without victimizing contributors.

As someone who did a lot of volunteer work over the years, I came to resent the idea that I should do everything for free. If we value this stuff, we should be willing to pay people to work on it. Finding a means to do so even though it is voluntary can be challenging, but shouldn't be show stopping. We just have to be creative.

[flukus]

I'd be worried that this might create an expectation to work on issues people were willing to pay for, whether that makes sense or not. I've seen a lot of this in commercial software, if a paying client want a feature then it get's added no matter how much sense it makes. Then every other customer has to deal with the feature bloat whether they want it or not.

It's also the root cause of a lot of technical debt, "we added this misfeature years ago because 1 client wanted it, so now we have to support it". It's important there is a proper funnel for what features should be added.