Bounties for Software Development?

rho asks: "Reading the MacOS on x86 article from Sunday, specifically the part where Apple engineers were offered $16-25K bonuses for finishing a proof of concept and I got to thinking about applying this to outside contractors in other applications. Are there companies who offer 'bounties' for working code for back-burner or skunk-works projects? Ideally, a company would post a project with specs and any appropriate code/APIs/flowcharts, enveloped by an NDA, which could be accessed by bounty-coders. The bounty goes to the first coder (or team of coders) that produce working code that meets specifications. Could this be a source of income for good open-source programmers, or would coporate secrecy issues interfere with the operation?" An interesting thought...would something like this work? If not, why not?

www.opencodex.com

[davidu]

I think opencodex.com has a contest offering 50,000 for the first person/group to make an open source DivX codec.


-Davidu

here are a few

[po_boy]

these sites have implemented pretty much what you're asking for:

www.sourcexchange.com [sourcexchange.com]
www.cosource.com [cosource.com]
The Free Software Bazaar [csustan.edu]

Let me know if you see any more. This could soon be my only source of income.

Problem

[photozz]

First problem I could see is. in the race to finish and get the "bounty", what would the acceptable bug limit be? I could see some fairly crapy, but barely functional code comming out of this.

Interesting

[Jordan Block]

I think this is a very interesting idea, and I wouldnt mind tryin it sometime. However, the logistivs / security issues may prove to be too much of a headache for companies to deal with.

Bounties for software

[thesurfaces.net]

Apparently QNX are very much into this...

If only they'd done this for DeCSS!

[RhetoricalQuestion]

The movie industry (and, come to think of it, many others) could support dozens of alternative OS's by offering this.

I mean, depending on the scale of the project, a few K per release is peanuts compared to the cost of doing it yourself. And they wouldn't have to spend too much on customer support -- they can just train their staff to say "We don't actually support that, however, you can check out X from Y.com and that might help you."

Happens all the time...

[human bean]

we just call it something else.

In private business, we would call this a "request for proposal", essentially "name your own bounty". In the public model, various government agencies (ARPA? DARPA? Is "Defense" in or out of fashion?) make "technology transfer requests", usually with a not-to-exceed amount. They don't mind if you take the whole bounty, but they might want to deal with someone who would do it for less.

The secrecy thing is handled in various ways, although the gov wants to know who knows their secrets (can't say I blame them), and private industry usually limits the distribution of the RFP to their friends.

What I really want to see is a bounty on users. We can bring back the ears...