# Bounties:  do they work?



## mathuin (Jun 22, 2009)

I have been hoping my laptop's wireless card would be supported for some time.  If I could do it myself, I would, but I haven't any experience in kernel drivers, only applications and those not as impressive as other folks might have.

I'd heard somewhere that other projects have "bounties" -- basically folks putting up money to make certain features more attractive to developers.  Turns out someone is running a bounty site for FreeBSD at http://www.freebsdbounties.info/ so I created an account and posted a bounty.

Do folks here think this is a viable approach for FreeBSD features?  Or is this just silly?  Is there a better way?


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## fronclynne (Jun 23, 2009)

Do any of the devs read freebsdbounties.info ?

I mean: I can't think of anything more useless than ranting in a vacuum.

("oh, God.  I'm useless." he screamed into the uptake hose of his hoover.)


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## fronclynne (Jun 23, 2009)

*Well, get with it, already!*

Also:
Things That Inspire Confidence, Part VI.022xX^XXVII:


> I'm a developer, what do I do?
> 
> Seen a bounty you think you could take on? Well we'll sort that out *real soon*...


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## hmallett (Jun 26, 2009)

mathuin said:
			
		

> Do folks here think this is a viable approach for FreeBSD features?  Or is this just silly?  Is there a better way?


Hi there,
I'm the developer of http://www.freebsdbounties.info
I created the site because as you say, other projects have bounties, and I've seen a few projects that have quite a lot of bounties (such as pfsense). There wasn't a way of recording bounties for FreeBSD before (though I had seen it proposed over a year earlier), so I thought I'd give it a try.


			
				fronclynne said:
			
		

> Do any of the devs read freebsdbounties.info ?


"I don't know" is the answer. Traffic is fairly low to the site at the moment, but it is there. It has been posted on the FreeBSD mailing list (freebsd-chat@), so it's not entirely unannounced, but it hasn't gained real momentum.... (yet).


			
				fronclynne said:
			
		

> Also:
> Things That Inspire Confidence, Part VI.022xX^XXVII:


It has been on my to-do list for a couple of months now, so I've done it now. A developer can register their interest, and the bounty owner will be notified by email. I have more ideas for the site, but I can only afford to spare a small amount of time for it at the moment.

To mathuin, thanks for posting your bounty - to others, please feel free to post one!

Happy bounty posting!

Hywel


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## lme@ (Jun 30, 2009)

@hmallet: Are you still in contact with Matt Olander from ixystems?
AFAIR you wanted to merge your FreeBSD Bounty sites.


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## hmallett (Jul 1, 2009)

I was only ever in contact with Matt Olander on list. Sadly ixsystems' site, http://www.SponsorBSD.org looks the same now as it did when I started working on http://www.freebsdbounties.info


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## lme@ (Jul 1, 2009)

Hm, perhaps you should drop him a mail about it? There's no need to invent the wheel twice and if you both work together you can probably more people to participate.


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## jrm@ (Jan 31, 2012)

*Dragonfly bounties - some inspiration*

http://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/developer/Code_Bounties/


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## Carpetsmoker (Feb 1, 2012)

Both sites appear pretty unmaintained and old...

The FreeBSD foundation does sponsored projects, which is more or less the same (A developer gets money to develop a specific feature).
IMHO this would get a lot more attention & momentum if the FreeBSD foundation would take up some sort of bounty program ...


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