Comment by olingern | Hacker News Reader

Comment by olingern | Hacker News Reader

Neat that that Github is looking into making open-source sustainable. I think a lot of maintainers hit a wall at some point. You have to have pretty thick skin to weather the entitlement people have to the thing(s) you put your life's free time into.

Some ideas that I frequently wish existed:

1. It would be neat if there was some sort of place in Github where people could upvote interesting project ideas, i.e. "Load testing tool in Go"

2. I'd also love to have a way to say, "I can devote 1-5 hours a week to this project" and be notified when someone tags an issue as 'help wanted'

3. Harder, but still do-able (I think). A place for open sourcers to organize a "team" to get a new project off the ground. I often think that there _must_ be other people interested in the same sort of projects I am -- but we have no way to "discover" each other unless you're some high profile Twitter user.

4. Moderation for trolls. Some people frequently open issues that frustrate maintainers. While they can just create a new account, I think creating a small barrier to entry would do some good.

5. A way for companies / individuals / etc. to donate to maintainers through Github. I think this would be a huge incentive for people to continue their work long-term and not just "hand over" repositories to people with ulterior motives.

5a) a way for me to add a bounty to an issue, I’ve had team members fix bugs and do pull requests that I’d have happily paid $50 $100 or more to the maintainer instead

This. I've always wondered why sites like GitHub/GitLab won't allow issues to have a bounty. It seems to me like its the obvious solution to crowdfunding OSS.

When I find an issue on GitHub requesting a new feature or reporting a bug that is important to me I should be able to throw down $5+ bucks to incentivize someone to fix it. I also know that I would personally contribute to OSS more if it didn't feel like I was doing community service but rather actually getting paid for my time.

Probably less of an issue now they're part of Microsoft, but if you're focused on source control / open source, you probably don't want to take on crowdfunding with all the associated drama and complexity, too. That's a business in itself.

True, but with the right hooks in place other providers could fill that niche.

If general consumers of OSS act entitled, then how entitled are bounty contributors who think their issues haven’t been properly fixed to their satisfaction going to be?

It's not an easy problem to solve. I could see there being a queue of bounty slots available for purchase that maintainers set and could be increased or decreased at anytime.

A person who wants to pay for a bounty would need to submit an issue, and the maintainer estimate it's complexity. At that point, the person filing the issue could click "Buy this issue" if the maintainer has bandwidth.

Again, not easy -- and I'm sure the UX / business / execution would be delicate.

> I would personally contribute to OSS more if it didn't feel like I was doing community service but rather actually getting paid for my time.

If you want that, you probably should look at UpWork instead of GitHub. Bounties are a nice way of prioritizing things, but most OSS projects won't get the kind of OSS contributions they want for the kind of money they need, simply because the kind of contributors they want can get 10x better pay on the job market, so why they should bother with OS when they can freelance?

Discounting the recent trends of companies open-sourcing stuff to build a market for themselves elsewhere, open source was always, first and foremost, doing a community service. This aspect is why OSS developers put time into it instead of getting extra paid work.

> but most OSS projects won't get the kind of OSS contributions they want for the kind of money they need, simply because the kind of contributors they want can get 10x better pay on the job market, so why they should bother with OS when they can freelance?

It would still be nice for those who are interested in working on those issues regardless of payment.

I'd love this as well - especially for small chunks of projects where it's not worth trying to track down a consultant for.

From everything I've seen (and I've also put up a few bounties myself), bounties generally don't work. Most bounties are put up only for longstanding issues, and those issues are longstanding because they are not trivial to fix. A $100 bounty then isn't much of an incentive, if e.g. $3000 worth of working hours have to be spent on fixing the issue.

Yeah, mixed bag for me as well, but if the mechanic was easier I think small bugs or improvements would easier to bounty.

Sometimes, I’d have my company pay $50 to merge a pull request :-)

Maybe there should be (if there isn't already) a way for multiple people to add to the same bounty. So if 100 people are all annoyed by some longstanding issue and each offer $100 bounties, that's $10k for someone to fix it.

With Bountysource (the platform I used), there is. IIRC, they will also post a comment on the issue, listing the current bounty, and optionally also automatically apply appropriate labels to issues, so it's obvious to anyone on the Github issue.

Most of the solutions proposed in this thread for one-off bounties here have already been implemented for years, which is why I am convinced that (with the current level of funding), bounties don't work.

Yeah, unfortunately it seems like one of those things that's a great idea in theory, but doesn't work well in practice.

#2 is more or less why I built https://www.codeshelter.co/. I tried to post it here (and I see that others did too) but it didn't take off. It's going well, though, as a project.

#1 - Somewhere to post your projects to interested audiences would be awesome. It's difficult to get some eyes on your project unless you already have a large social media following.

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