I think there should be a better way to promote and support open source software development, but I'm making the assumption that people are willing to pay to get issues done, what do you think about it?
And similarly, I'd pay good money to have certain StackOverflow questions answered. But if these things seem like a no-brainer, there's a good reason why they're not available. (Third-parties have stepped in, but they're not officially supported.) Introducing money into the ecosystem can spoil people's motivation to do anything for free.<p>This was one of the lessons from Google Answers, an early version of Stack, Quora, etc, which paid people.<p>There's a good basis in psychology for this. If you look at studies about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, you find payments (and external rewards generally) can be counter-productive and make people less motivated than if they're doing the same task for free.
That entirely depends on the issue and whether it's blocking a way for me to make money. Assuming it's a no-go for something I need to do, then I'll hire the smartest guy I can find and contribute the code back into the project.
I think maybe each bug could have a pot where people could put an amount, and if a developer fixed that bug and enough people agreed he would get that pot.<p>That way developers could pick the bugs where people are willing to put their money where their mouth is.
This would change my work from a hobby to being a business. If someone pays for a ticket, the roles change a bit. The person who pays will expect something from you. I personally would not do that. If you like what I do, send me a beer afterwards. Or a gittip or a flattr. But don't pay me money.
Totally shallow poll. I've paid over a thousand bucks to have a bug fixed, and there are things I'm waiting for on GitHub which are probably worth less than $50.
It depends on the issue I suppose, and what I was using the code for. Obviously I want to help out other developers, but if we start adding to the idea that 'paying for open source absolution' is okay you start to get things like this: <a href="http://readwrite.com/2013/05/31/mysql-co-founder-wants-you-to-pay-up-for-open-source" rel="nofollow">http://readwrite.com/2013/05/31/mysql-co-founder-wants-you-t...</a><p>Which I really don't think is okay. However, I fully support helping developers spend their time doing what they love to do; but wouldn't spend more than $5 on any one thing. If you think about it, you could have a really successful middleware or something and get $5 from 1,000 people at once, or $5,000 for doing something that you were intending on doing anyways... Seems kinda underhanded to me as an open source developer.
What about a bidding based system for specific work effort for each ticket? EDIT: Github could also perhaps promote the ability of the community to give a project maintainer money and then the maintainer could distribute it to people who provide accepted PRs based on some kind of formula or as they see fit and just keep it for themselves. While we are at it it would be really great to see a system to manage contributor license agreement as well as providing a standard set of OSS friendly agreements.
For reasons explained well here <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5828677" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5828677</a> I don't like this idea. I think it goes against the very motivation behind open source software.<p>What I think what would work better is if you had the option in github to vote up a bug (or expose the number of people following/watching it) so that the owner of a repository could use that number in deciding how important a bug is to his/her userbase.
I have hundreds of open source modules and I really hate this idea. It creates a monetary incentive for developers to keep adding more features even when they are bad ideas. Also, what happens when a paid issue/feature was a mistake and should really be removed later? The economic incentive does not align very well with creating the most appropriate set of features for the task at hand and you end up with bulky enterprise kitchen-sink software.
Mikeal Rogers did something like this[1] for his popular Request module for Node. Except he crowdfunded a pool of money for bounties to be paid to whoever fixed the most pressing pull requests.<p><a href="https://www.bountysource.com/#fundraisers/251-request" rel="nofollow">https://www.bountysource.com/#fundraisers/251-request</a>
Cool idea, but don't pollute Github's UI with this feature. Developers rely on Github to have a consistent UI — I think we all hate when it changes a bit.<p>Another website managing this would be nice. It could tie into Github's API and offer this service.
I don't think setting a specific price for issues is a wise idea. However, a crowdfunding feature on public github repositories would be interesting. Just show a list of financial contributors in addition to the code contributors.