[Interest] Bounties?

[Bo Thorsen]

Den 13-03-2015 kl. 23:45 skrev Bernhard:
>> I think it'll be a lot easier to convince the Qt Project JIRA admins to
> hack on a
>> bounty system if there's some precedence that the system actually works :)
>
> Sounds like a chicken-and-egg problem... I am pretty sure this will not work
> without seamless JIRA integration.

Bounty systems can't work, no matter how good an idea it might seem to 
be. Here's just a few of the reasons why:

* Suppose you create a bounty. A year later someone fixes the bug in the 
latest version. How is payment guaranteed? Do you have to pay a middle 
man immediately? You won't do that because the bounty might never be 
claimed, but if you don't, how can the fixer be certain he will get the 
bounty? This only grows worse, if there are multiple payees to a bounty 
(which is usually how people think this might work).

* You created the bounty for Qt version 5.1.0. But that's a dead branch 
and it's impossible to get the fix in upstream. How do you handle if 
someone fixes the bug in a later version?

* How do you handle bugs that disappear? As rare as this may be, 
sometimes bugs actually do disappear, for example when they are a 
symptom of an underlying but seemingly different problem.

* Who handles when you disagree that the bug is fixed?

It's a HUGE piece of work to do this in any way that's not just comments 
in JIRA, and it's a legal nightmare. And it just doesn't work. We tried 
this when I worked for Monty Program (the company that created MariaDB, 
run by the guy that wrote MySQL). I don't know how long after I left 
that they kept trying to do it, but AFAIK they never once actually had a 
bounty that was paid.

Why do you think those bounty sites are deserted?

If you think you're the one who will make an idea that have been proven 
impossible to realize, go right ahead. This is only my opinion, and I'm 
in no position to stop anyone doing it. But IMHO this should not be done 
within the Qt ecosystem.

When you need to have a bug fixed, pay someone to do it.

Bo Thorsen,
Director, Viking Software.

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