[Interest] Bounties?

[Bo Thorsen]

Den 11-03-2015 kl. 11:37 skrev Bernhard:
> Hi!
>
> We are a very small startup company (having part time Qt developers only).
> We are experiencing that non-fatal bugs as well as suggestions pile up
> infinitely or simply are ignored or don't have caretaker at all. Votes seem
> to be ignored most time too and personal severity does not matter anyway.
> Unfortunately we cannot afford a lot of time or money to fix found issues by
> our self (or pay someone to do this). This situation makes Qt development
> more and more difficult for us.
>
> So here are two questions:
> 1. Is there some kind of bounty system/site/service or something equivalent
> to it? Especially for issues that affect more than one developer/company
> this could be a very effective and affordable way to get rid of issues
> without burden a single developer/company with the costs.
> 2. Are there any special support agreements for small companies / startups /
> part-time developers / hobbyists that help getting issues fixed without big
> costs?

Hi Bernhard,

The bounties approach has been tried often, and it sounds like a good 
idea. I also worked for a year at the company behind MariaDB which tried 
to do this on a larger scale. But so far I've only heard about failures 
with it.

One thing that you can do which is quite cheap is to improve the bug 
reports. Make sure there's a small self contained piece of example code 
that shows the problem. Focus on the "small" - a 100K lines of code 
project that shows the problem is useless in bug reports). By improving 
the bugs and perhaps even posting some info on where the problem might 
be in Qt, you increase the chance that one of the Qt developers will 
pick up the bug. Also, the easier the problem is to spot in the example 
application, the more important it might look, so again, you increase 
the chances.

You could also assign one of your own developers to fix the problem. Qt 
isn't closed, after all.

Failing this, there are three things you can do, if you do want to throw 
a bit of money behind it:

1) Let an experienced Qt guy look at the code that hit the problems and 
see if it's possible to work around it. Sometimes solutions are best 
done by approaching the problem from a different direction.

2) Implement hacks (aka more involved workarounds) by looking at the Qt 
source code. For example, if you need a combo box that works slightly 
different, you might be able to create a completely new widget that just 
uses the style to paint your widget like a combobox. Finding options 
like those are difficult and requires a lot of experience.

3) Hire Qt Company or one of us Qt consulting companies to implement a 
Qt fix and work on getting it upstream.

When looking at the cost of this, 1 or 2 is cheaper, 3 might be a longer 
term fix. Nr 1 might be done by your own guys with the help of this 
mailing list.

I hope this helps,

Bo.

-- 
Viking Software
Qt and C++ developers for hire
http://www.vikingsoft.eu