[amirathi]

This is great. Other comments here are underestimating the power of a group. An average bounty on an issue might just be between $10-$100 but there can easily be 50 people putting up a bounty for a popular issue (have you seen issues with hundreads of upvotes and are still open for years). If we start seeing (collective) bounty on an issue in the range of a few thousand $$ then it's decent money for maintainers or anyone else who's motivated enough.

My guess is this is eventually going to be built into GitHub (via acquisition or otherwise).

[dash2]

Open source is a public good, which means open source bugfixing is likely to be undersupplied by private demand. I think this needs a kickstarter-like way for groups of people to "contribute only if others also do so".

[themanmaran]

The kickstarter approach is something I've been thinking about a lot lately. Since people are much more likely to pledge funds than to give cash.

Since there is the chance that the money gets refunded, people are willing to up the contribution.

[khalilravanna]

Was just thinking the same thing on the “built into GitHub” thing. Being able to easily see the current bounty directly in GitHub and donate $10 to the bounty with one click I imagine would make adoption blow up.

[tpetry]

Yeah and now extend this idea to start a bounty of 100$ for the maintainer of a library/framework to merge your pull request, completely new ways for open sources projects to be paid for their hard work.