[Foundation-l] Fundraising "Bugging for Dollars"

[Brion Vibber]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Geoffrey Plourde wrote:
> How about we build a bounty board into Bugzilla?

My impression is that bounties wouldn't work terribly well in our sort
of environment.

First and foremost, the amount of money involved tends to be trivial
compared to the market cost of contracting someone to do the work, so
it's not enough to seriously motivate someone for pay.

At the same time, it's enough to carry the risk of tarnishing the
"honor" of volunteer development -- we get our best work out of
self-motivated volunteers, and that's the pool most of our current tech
staff and contract devs have come out of.

Add to this the complications of bounty assignment when multiple people
are involved in a fix -- often a single bug will go through several
iterations of patches over time, and be further modified when applied --
plus the general bookkeeping difficulties of little bits of money going
through the non-profit company...

For these reasons we haven't implemented bounties during previous
discussions of them, and I really don't see it happening.


What I do expect us to continue doing is keeping a small (and slightly
expanded!) group of staff developers and a pool of available part-time
contractors for additional high-priority "big" projects.

- -- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (Darwin)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iEYEARECAAYFAkfj7WcACgkQwRnhpk1wk451BwCghWcHrKTfMJzmHliUJ1VANH04
nUAAnRvRKdi+06Kqd1RHFO+lhXJ1A5I/
=8Xx5
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----