[zcesur]

I don't think people discussing approaches, asking questions & looking to collaborate is battle royale. In healthy-enough OSS projects that happens with or without bounties

Also some sort of acceptance criteria have to be in place, and "first viable solution gets the reward" is reasonable enough

People have agency to make decisions such as trying to solve a bounty (to get experience, feedback from peers/maintainers & maybe a reward) but you decided to shut them down, delete their comments and get offended on their behalf

You're not obligated to entertain, review or merge code you don't approve and it was your right to shut down the initiative by Wasmer

[ayewo]

I think there are 2 dynamics that Andrew Kelley alluded to that Algora / Wasmer could have addressed better:

1. Consulting with the Ziglang leadership before creating the issue that kicked off the bounty. Doing it this way would have allowed them to provide some input on perhaps splitting the bounty, improving the acceptance criteria and other logistical stuff, rather than allow them find out later when the comments were devolving into personal attacks.

2. Splitting the bounty. Offering three bounties: $2500, $1500 and $1000 increases the likelihood of producing different approaches and rewards skill as opposed to one $5000 bounty that rewards the fastest person, to the detriment of others working on it. The amount spent is the same but the outcome is less of a battle royale.

3. If splitting the bounty is not an option (because the intent is for the high-ticket $5000 on offer to fuel Wasmer’s marketing), then at least more thought should go into how the bounty is administered by working with Ziglang leadership so that it doesn’t create unhealthy competition or at least draw people with the right skills.

Zama runs a big-ticket bounty program that is worth emulating in how it is run https://github.com/zama-ai/bounty-program

[zcesur]

Agreed on all 3 points here, thanks for sharing your thoughts, super helpful

Following your feedback, perhaps community bounties should be by default only shared with maintainers, and then the maintainers can choose whether to complete them themselves [1], or make them public, or disregard

This approach would prevent situations like the above and hopefully also helps with FOSS sustainability

[1]: https://twitter.com/algoraio/status/1703115434055082086

[ayewo]

Yes, exactly.

Courting the maintainers for their permission first could have avoided this scenario.

So, assuming you did that but Ziglang leadership declined, for whatever reason, then the alternative would be to host the bounty on Wasmer’s repo as they have done now https://github.com/wasmerio/wasmer/issues/4218.

[bdzr]

It's not worth arguing. The irony of all of this is that free labor is welcomed in the open source world, but if a carrot is offered it's somehow evil and consenting adults need to be protected from themselves.

[tpmoney]

I think it's less that a carrot is offered and more than carrots can be more or less harmful to the project as a whole and the developers both maintaining the project and working for the carrot depending on how the carrot is offered. ZSF seems plenty happy to pay people for work. They also seem plenty happy with companies that are employing people that do work with and for Zig. The complaint here is about a form of payment that amounts to encouraging developers to race against time and each other to complete a specific task, rather than actually take the time to do work that has been prioritized and vetted.

This whole thing is very reminiscent of the disaster that was Hacktoberfest, where a prize was offered to do a task on other people's projects without consideration for the how the nature of the incentive might change the nature of the completed work.