bribes, or bounties, or prizes, or whatever you want to call it work on the extrinsic motivations for people to act. In many cases, open source projects are a product of love, that is, intrinsic motivations. There's always a risk when introducing extrinsic motivations that they'll crowd out the intrinsic.
I see where you are coming from, but I find that for myself, I come to different conclusions.
I work on open source not just because I love my product, but due to an element of wanting to show off. It's kind of a badge of honor, a point of pride to have a project that people use and love.
Which is to say that, without the motivation of others using my project, wanting to contribute to it, and even wanting to donate money to the project, my personal level of interest declines ("nobody is using this anyway.")
Human motivation is complicated. Chances are that ones relationship to some kind of labour is mixed with both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations: implementing the back end might be fun for you, while the front end is tedious, or vice versa. Or maybe it was only fun to make 90% of the features, while polishing those features and delivering the last 10% is a lot of tedium. Things like this might help to make some open source products more well-rounded.
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bribes, or bounties, or prizes, or whatever you want to call it work on the extrinsic motivations for people to act. In many cases, open source projects are a product of love, that is, intrinsic motivations. There's always a risk when introducing extrinsic motivations that they'll crowd out the intrinsic.
I see where you are coming from, but I find that for myself, I come to different conclusions.
I work on open source not just because I love my product, but due to an element of wanting to show off. It's kind of a badge of honor, a point of pride to have a project that people use and love.
Which is to say that, without the motivation of others using my project, wanting to contribute to it, and even wanting to donate money to the project, my personal level of interest declines ("nobody is using this anyway.")
Human motivation is complicated. Chances are that ones relationship to some kind of labour is mixed with both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations: implementing the back end might be fun for you, while the front end is tedious, or vice versa. Or maybe it was only fun to make 90% of the features, while polishing those features and delivering the last 10% is a lot of tedium. Things like this might help to make some open source products more well-rounded.