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These projects [1] would disagree. This year 498 bounties ($53,410) have been rewarded to 166 contributors from 45 countries, they were funded primarily by comm

by zcesur 3y ago

These projects [1] would disagree. This year 498 bounties ($53,410) have been rewarded to 166 contributors from 45 countries, they were funded primarily by commercial open source founders/maintainers to support product & devrel (get more work done, grow community, reward contributors, gain visibility). There's also an experimental use case where FOSS users themselves create bounties to pay contributors/maintainers to ship new updates and features. We call these 'community bounties'. The $5,000 WASIX support bounty in Zig was created by Wasmer, but the Zig maintainers didn't welcome it (which is totally fair, it's their choice) and this blog post is a rant about it I guess? [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37457921 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37457921

capableweb 3y ago
Maybe it's worth responding directly to the criticism from Zig rather than calling what they are saying a "rant". Actually, since you don't address anything in your comment, one could call that one a "rant" as well.
- Macha 3y ago
  I thought we would have learned for platforms not to facilitate bounties for non-participating projects after the tip4commit/mitsuhiko drama of years past: https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/127 https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/127
- zcesur 3y ago
  > competition at the expense of cooperation We've seen contributors author PRs together and split bounties. Also contributors in the Zig thread were actually trying to collaborate on a solution (comments were deleted) > Instead of scouting for a suitable candidate Open calls have faster turnaround & lower overhead > clear contract ... payout Sometimes design & implementation is not decided and spec'ed in advance and multiple perspectives & sometimes PoCs are required, at which point the maintainers can choose a plan of action and assign a developer without much duplicate work. That's classic OSS dev with or without bounties. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37543536 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37543536 there's more replies here that I agree with -- I also suggest you checkout the discussions deleted by Zig for a full perspective https://pastebin.com/nDA0LD3N https://pastebin.com/nDA0LD3N As a matter of fact the initial convo on the thread proved contrary to the every point made regarding competition and "battle royal dynamics" as people attempting the bounty were actually collaborating. We've seen quite a few cases where people authored PRs together and split the rewards on Algora. In addition there was no "pressure on the development team to accept the winning submission" it was explicitly stated that the work did not need to be merged upstream, and that the sponsorship would be awarded as soon as the technical requirements were met. -- Ultimately, bounties are a tool. It's in maintainers' discretion whether or not to use it. The optimal design for a bounties platform is still a work in progress. We're two bootstrapped founders (one developer) figuring things out along the way, trying to give folks a good experience and trying to learn.
  - kristoff_it 3y ago
    > > Instead of scouting for a suitable candidate > Open calls have faster turnaround & lower overhead I think your perspective is made perfectly clear if you believe that having 10 people do duplicate work is less overhead than having one manager do some managerial work.
    - zcesur 3y ago
      Can you show me the 10 people that made duplicate work?
      - kristoff_it 3y ago
        You can see in the archived thread you yourself linked that 3 people are working on it in parallel while a 4th who was interested in doing the work states that they don't want to participate in a battle royale. Add to this some discussions that I've had in private and we get to 10 pretty quickly. Are you sure it's wise to argue that feature bounties don't result in competition and duplicate work when presented to a healthy-enough OSS project? This bounty was publicized by Wasmer as "the first developer that adds support" is the one who gets the money: https://twitter.com/wasmerio/status/1701168305103331701?s=20 https://twitter.com/wasmerio/status/1701168305103331701?s=20
        zcesur 3y ago
        I don't think people discussing approaches, asking questions & looking to collaborate is battle royale. In healthy-enough OSS projects that happens with or without bounties Also some sort of acceptance criteria have to be in place, and "first viable solution gets the reward" is reasonable enough People have agency to make decisions such as trying to solve a bounty (to get experience, feedback from peers/maintainers & maybe a reward) but you decided to shut them down, delete their comments and get offended on their behalf You're not obligated to entertain, review or merge code you don't approve and it was your right to shut down the initiative by Wasmer
        3y ago

by zcesur 3y ago

capableweb 3y ago

Maybe it's worth responding directly to the criticism from Zig rather than calling what they are saying a "rant". Actually, since you don't address anything in your comment, one could call that one a "rant" as well.

Macha 3y ago
I thought we would have learned for platforms not to facilitate bounties for non-participating projects after the tip4commit/mitsuhiko drama of years past: https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/127 https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/127
zcesur 3y ago
> competition at the expense of cooperation We've seen contributors author PRs together and split bounties. Also contributors in the Zig thread were actually trying to collaborate on a solution (comments were deleted) > Instead of scouting for a suitable candidate Open calls have faster turnaround & lower overhead > clear contract ... payout Sometimes design & implementation is not decided and spec'ed in advance and multiple perspectives & sometimes PoCs are required, at which point the maintainers can choose a plan of action and assign a developer without much duplicate work. That's classic OSS dev with or without bounties. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37543536 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37543536 there's more replies here that I agree with -- I also suggest you checkout the discussions deleted by Zig for a full perspective https://pastebin.com/nDA0LD3N https://pastebin.com/nDA0LD3N As a matter of fact the initial convo on the thread proved contrary to the every point made regarding competition and "battle royal dynamics" as people attempting the bounty were actually collaborating. We've seen quite a few cases where people authored PRs together and split the rewards on Algora. In addition there was no "pressure on the development team to accept the winning submission" it was explicitly stated that the work did not need to be merged upstream, and that the sponsorship would be awarded as soon as the technical requirements were met. -- Ultimately, bounties are a tool. It's in maintainers' discretion whether or not to use it. The optimal design for a bounties platform is still a work in progress. We're two bootstrapped founders (one developer) figuring things out along the way, trying to give folks a good experience and trying to learn.
- kristoff_it 3y ago
  > > Instead of scouting for a suitable candidate > Open calls have faster turnaround & lower overhead I think your perspective is made perfectly clear if you believe that having 10 people do duplicate work is less overhead than having one manager do some managerial work.
  - zcesur 3y ago
    Can you show me the 10 people that made duplicate work?
    - kristoff_it 3y ago
      You can see in the archived thread you yourself linked that 3 people are working on it in parallel while a 4th who was interested in doing the work states that they don't want to participate in a battle royale. Add to this some discussions that I've had in private and we get to 10 pretty quickly. Are you sure it's wise to argue that feature bounties don't result in competition and duplicate work when presented to a healthy-enough OSS project? This bounty was publicized by Wasmer as "the first developer that adds support" is the one who gets the money: https://twitter.com/wasmerio/status/1701168305103331701?s=20 https://twitter.com/wasmerio/status/1701168305103331701?s=20
      - zcesur 3y ago
        I don't think people discussing approaches, asking questions & looking to collaborate is battle royale. In healthy-enough OSS projects that happens with or without bounties Also some sort of acceptance criteria have to be in place, and "first viable solution gets the reward" is reasonable enough People have agency to make decisions such as trying to solve a bounty (to get experience, feedback from peers/maintainers & maybe a reward) but you decided to shut them down, delete their comments and get offended on their behalf You're not obligated to entertain, review or merge code you don't approve and it was your right to shut down the initiative by Wasmer
        3y ago