posting coding bounties, appropriate money amounts?

[Matt Olander]

On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 3:06 PM, Ivan Voras <ivoras at freebsd.org> wrote:
> Dan Naumov wrote:
>>
>> Hello
>>
>> I am curious about posting some coding bounties, my current interest
>> revolves around improving the ZVOL functionality in FreeBSD: fixing
>> the known ZVOL SWAP reliability/stability problems as well as making
>> ZVOLs work as a dumpon device (as is already the case in OpenSolaris)
>> for crash dumps. I am a private individual and not some huge Fortune
>> 100 and while I am not exactly rich, I am willing to put some of my
>> personal money towards this. I am curious though, what would be the
>> best way to approach this: directly approaching committer(s) with the
>> know-how-and-why of the areas involved or through the FreeBSD
>> Foundation? And how would one go about calculating the appropriate
>> amount of money for such a thing?
>
> Hi,
>
> This idea (bounties) appear approximately every 6 months and it appears
> there is no better way than contacting the developers directly. AFAIK all
> attempts to conglomerate such an effort have failed. One important
> conclusion is that it cannot go through the Foundation since they cannot
> accept targeted donations.

Awhile back, we built a simple app for posting bounties, getting devs
and sponsors on board, posting the committed code in a browser
viewable format, and then handle final payout upon completion.
iXsystems is more than willing to handle financial details and I would
gladly be the first to sponsor this project on the site.

http://www.sponsorbsd.org

We would need a team leader *cough* Ivan *cough* that could make sure
developing contributors are actually involved so that the final payoff
can be shared accordingly.

It's a cakephp app and I'm sure it needs a bit more polish but we
could do it on the fly and it shouldn't be to hard :)

Any cakephp or php devs interested in helping testing and launch, let
me know. I just haven't had much time to spend on launching it
although I still think it's a great idea. If somebody would like to
spearhead this effort, that would be great.

For companies wishing to sponsor non-community code, it also has the
option of hiding the community committed code.

best,
-matt