"hacking the social system"

[Christian Mueller]

Am Samstag, 30. April 2005 02:07 schrieb Jesse Haubrich:
> How about a bounty system?  If a user wants something done they can
> offer a bounty.  The committee can establish a forum to handle the
> exchange of communication and money between users and developers.
 


There has been a recent discussion about this:
http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-usability&m=111061301417977&w=2


It turned out that some developers had serious objections 
against this idea, for example 

- Practical problems (a lot of administration needed, 
  difficult to judge who did the real work,
  bank charges for international transfers, ...)

- Low code quality if a developer is fixated on getting a 
  certain feature done to get the money rather than 
  concentrating on a clean solution. 

- Maintaining a patch once it's integrated may be more 
  work than actually writing it, and more tedious 
  (the wrong person would have gotten the money).

- No one would value the important work on KDE's foundation 
  (the things that made KDE great!) because it isn't directly 
  tied to user-visible features.

- These bounties wouldn't be anywhere near the salary 
  of a professional software developer!  People hack on KDE
  for money to make a living (then you need a real salary, 
  not just little bounties) or for fun.  

  The ones who do it for fun won't be much more motivated 
  by bounties than they already are.  I was a little surprised 
  but there have even been people who said they'd be stopping 
  working on KDE if that bounty system was adopted by KDE proper (IIRC).




> Praise is a good thing, but I'm not sure it's the motivational force for
> most developers?

Fun is a big motivational force for a lot of Open Source developers. 
And I do think that praise and fun are related. :)  


Christian. 

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-quality/attachments/20050430/bba7f2c9/attachment.pgp