| 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. |