I have run large open source projects before with hundreds of contributors. From the maintainer side and imagining what it'd be like from the contributor side, I'm not sure bounties are worth it.
There's a lot of back and forth on the code reviews and no guarantee your code will be merged (and thus paid). You could address all code review comments and even then your PR may get ignored once it's all ready to merge.
From the maintainer side, PRs still take a lot of work to review and merge in. So you need to factor in the overhead of doing the code review and communications back and forth, and trying to parse someone else's code.
I think OSS is best built the way it's always been built, by passion or necessity from contributors. I think for more substantial projects, money for output works, but then it's better off going into a contract/agreement rather than having a bunch of contributors independently throwing in their shot.
On the flip side, I think the bigger problem is getting open source maintainers paid too, rather than fly-by contributors.
I also remember another company in my batch that did the same thing as well. I think they pivoted? You could talk to them (W18).
Comments
I have run large open source projects before with hundreds of contributors. From the maintainer side and imagining what it'd be like from the contributor side, I'm not sure bounties are worth it.
There's a lot of back and forth on the code reviews and no guarantee your code will be merged (and thus paid). You could address all code review comments and even then your PR may get ignored once it's all ready to merge.
From the maintainer side, PRs still take a lot of work to review and merge in. So you need to factor in the overhead of doing the code review and communications back and forth, and trying to parse someone else's code.
I think OSS is best built the way it's always been built, by passion or necessity from contributors. I think for more substantial projects, money for output works, but then it's better off going into a contract/agreement rather than having a bunch of contributors independently throwing in their shot.
On the flip side, I think the bigger problem is getting open source maintainers paid too, rather than fly-by contributors.
I also remember another company in my batch that did the same thing as well. I think they pivoted? You could talk to them (W18).