Bounties have been traditionally seen in open source as a way of brining new blood into a project, or increasing the pool of developer resources available to open source. Offering money for the production of a particular feature is intended to inspire people not involved with the project to come in, do a piece of work, then go back to their day to day lives. The existing developers may be too overworked to implement the feature themselves due to preexisting commitments. The item of work may even be designed to cross project boundaries and inspire cooperation at a level that did not exist before the bounty's effect was felt.
There are seveeral problems with this view of a bounty system, but perhaps the most important is one that Mary Gardiner identifies:
I mean, these things just seem like a potential minefield to me. And I don't mean legally, in the sense of people suing each other over bountified things that did or did not happen or bounties that did or did not get paid. I just mean in the sense of an enormous amount of sweat and blood spilled over the details of when the task is complete.
The point she makes is that it isn't possible to simply develop new feature x as a stand-alone piece of software and dump it into someone else's codebase. There is a great deal of bridge building that needs to happen on both the technical and social levels before a transfer of code is possible between a mercenary developer and an fortified project encampment.
These are the same kinds of issues a traditional closed software house has when they hire a contractor. Who is this contractor? What are their skills? Why are they being paid more than me? Will they incorporate into our corporate culture? Will their code incorporate into our codebase? Will they follow our development procedures and coding standards? There are plenty of ways to get each other off-side.
I consider it important to look for in-house talent. I don't think bounty systems should be geared towards the outside contractor, but instead to the core development team. I don't think bounty funds should be provided by the core development team to outsiders. Instead, I see bounties as a way for users of free software to contribute effectively to the core development team.
The Effient Software view of bounty collection and dispersion is that bounties are paid to developers who are already integrated on a social and techinical level with the core team. They may be full time or part time. They may work with other projects as well. This does not make them a mercenary. These are the people who don't come to the project just to do a single job. They watch the mailing lists. They spend appropriate time in irc channels and involved in other forms of instant communications for the sake of resolving technical issues. It is the core developer who should be rewarded for meeting the needs of the project's user base. It is the core developer who has the best chance of a successful development.
Finding the conclusion of the development should be straightforward and uncontraversial. It is as per project policy. The policy may be that an initial code drop is sufficient to collect a bounty. The policy may require a certain level of unit testing or review. It may require a certain level of user satisfaction. Because the developer is engaged in the policy process, the process is not a surprise or a minefield. Newer developers may be attracted to the project by successful funding of more established developers, and will have to break into the culture and policy... but that is to be expected when an outsider wants to become part of any core development group. The newcomer learns the policies over time, and the policies are as reasonable as the project needs them to be to both attract new blood and to fund the project as a whole. The interesting thing about open source is that if they get this balance wrong, it is likely they will be outcompeted by another group working on a fork of their software. The incentive is strong to get it right.
Money is a dangerous thing to throw into any organisation, and most open source projects get by without any dependable supply. There are real risks to changing your development model to one that involves an explicit money supply. I see rewards, however, and I see an industry that is ready to turn down this path. I think open source is the best-poised approach to take this path to its natural conclusion of efficient software production.
Benjamin