[Interest] Bounties?

[Jason H]

> > -----Original Message-----
> > [...]
> > > Sorry, but I can't help to think that, if that is too expensive for
> > > your business, the money you'd dedicate to a bug bounty would be
> > > pocket money, too. And
> > 
> > Some support guy told me that priority bug fixing comes with enterprise
> > license (Silver support). (Still I did not get any response from the CC-ed sales
> > person about the costs but surely they are significant)
> 
> That's not true as such. Though having silver or gold support will hopefully give the task an extra boost :)
> 
> > Regarding $174 for a professional license... for a startup this IS a significant
> > amount of money. Also I have doubts about effectivity of Bronze support
> > level regarding bug fixes.
> 
> Alright, I didn't want to be rude. Sure there are people for which $174 is a lot of money, and I appreciate that you and other's feel committed to contribute to Qt in one way or the other.
> 
> Still, I remain skeptical for a money-based bounty system for Qt. I'm not aware of any project successfully implementing such a bounty system, although the idea pops up since years [1]. Also, my best guess is that most people contributing to Qt are either employed to do this, or have other day-time jobs. And their count is limited: So by backing up "your" bug with money you at best shifting focus around.
> 
> What I'd rather like to see is getting more people to be active contributors. This way we could actually achieve more in total ... I'd like to think of the Qt developer community as pretty open and inclusive, but surely there's still stuff to improve. 
> 
> > [...]
> > > Whenever actual money has to be transferred world-wide it IMO will be
> > > considerable effort.
> > 
> > This is no problem using Paypal. There are many internet businesses out
> > there doing this all day.
> 
> If I'm actually after the money, I'll rather make sure that semi-anonymous JIRA user who placed the bounty pays in the end. I don't see how this can work short of a trusted entity taking care of this.
> 
> [1]: See e.g. https://blogs.kde.org/2005/05/14/thoughts-votes-and-bounties . There are also traces of a GNOME bounty system on the net from 2005 ...

FWIW, I would love a bounty system. There are a few small scope "showstopper" issues that I frequently run into and having something better than posting a ransom on this group would be a much better way to go about it.

Features of a official/semi-official system.
- Awards only go to the person(s) who contribute lines of code to the solution. (Fair and equitable disbursement)
- Award decisions are not made by the funder or the developer, but a 3rd impartial body.
- Code goes into Qt proper, with regular Q/A processes 
- Multiple people with the same issue can combine bounties
- Digia/Whomever owns Qt now can take a small % for mainating the system overall.

Downsides:
- Qt can be 'derailed' by big players (Like Nokia did with Qt Mobile) 
- Existing paid Qt developers... We don't want to derail their work. How does existing compensation systems work?