My main goal is to bring some more support into open source development, and to encourage new people to contribute to projects.
Would love to hear any feedback on the site, or bugs you find!
If I was to set a bounty for an issue that would be laborious and therefore expensive to fix, I'd want to be able to withdraw my funding in case the issue does not get fixed in a reasonable amount of time. Leaving money tied up on the service indefinitely is not really an option when you start talking about the kind of money that would actually motivate someone to do a lot of work.
This creates a problem where it's really risky for a developer to take on any hard problems. If funds can be pulled at any time, you might not get paid. Also, of course, there's duplication of effort- someone might beat you to closing the issue, meaning you get nothing and have wasted your time.
This, in turn, means that pricing on the service must be very high to account for the risks of non-payment, or be so low as to be insignificant.
There are some mitigation strategies available. Funding could have an end date, after which the funds are returned to the funder. This still leaves the issue of parallel effort, which seems harder to solve. Preregistering to close an issue by some deadline might work, but likely would result in a lot of issues going unsolved, and now you need some kind of ranking system for developers on the service...
This is something that I've been going back and forth on for a while. I've considered having the money be a 'pledge' like Kickstarter. Where people pledge the funds and pay out when the issue gets resolved.
But that can add some technical concerns (keeping track of peoples bank details to charge them) as well as less assurance that the developer will get paid.
And I especially don't want to have a platform where a developer puts in the work and doesn't earn the bounty.
Parallel effort is another tricky one to solve. And I see it all the time even without funding involved. Someone comments that they're working on an issue, and then everyone else drops it for 6 months only to realize that person dropped it too.
I think that splitting bounties could be a good solution. Have multiple people contribute towards a branch, and the funding gets distributed evenly.
- Please clarify what happens to funds when a bounty isn’t claimed. - Is it possible to retract funding? - As another commenter pointed out, what about situations where the involved parties would rather not use Rysolv? If a funded issue is closed, what happens next?
Also it would be nice if I could fund in €.
Concretely, I wanted to list https://github.com/grncdr/otssh/ on there. I’m offering 500 € for the creation of a fairly simple program, but I want to know what happens to my money before in the above situations before handing it over to Rysolv.
For our open source project (https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups). We participated in hacktoberfest recently and one problem we ran into is people submitting low quality PRs. Which ends up taking up way more time to review than to merge.
I would love to be able to filter by users who have merged multiple issues or some sort of quality bar for our bounties. Obviously since you are just starting out your users won't have too many issues merged. You might be able to work around this by finding the number of Github issues an author have merged previously to any projects that is greater than x number of stars. This way you might be able to bootstrap some credibility of the authors. Then a open source maintainer can gate on only allowing some reputable contributors.
One inspiration I would recommend is taking a look at how 99designs has different tiers of designers you can have a bounty for your design. If you could build 99design for open project that would be amazing. Best of Luck!
Never the less something like this is likely needed. With reference to the digital ocean free shirt pull request saga :)
Are you joking here, or do you literally mean, that (besides fixing) this would cause bugs? I hadn't thought about that.
> Obviously since you are just starting out your users won't have too many issues merged
Sponsors may very well be looking for a temporary fix, something that can last them a year, or one project. No credibility necessary, just a fix.
Not really a problem, though; a sponsor can fork on Github, then put a bounty and accept the PR even though upstream would never merge it.
But I wouldn't necessarily want to block new developers from being able to contribute to a project. I think it would be best to have anyone able to contribute, but perhaps a flag on the project owner side to see that user's rating.
i.e. How does this not become the Brave issue all over again: taking funds from people without a confirmed way to pass those funds on to the person they think it's going to.
> Anyone can import an issue to the site and contribute towards the bounty. Whoever submits a pull request closing out the issue earns the bounty.
Imagine this scenario:
John files an issue on Project Foo, submits that issue to Rysolv, and pays some money to "contribute" to getting it fixed.
Joan sees the issue filed on Project Foo's issue tracker, and submits a patch.
According to the statement from the parent comment I replied to, that money would be paid to Joan. But Joan has no existing relationship with Rysolv, and thus they have no way to pay her for the fix.
So what happens to that money?
The bigger question is how do you handle disputes. Who decides that the issue is actually resolved? What if the fix involves multiple people?
But "you took my money where did it go" is without doubt a bigger problem - Brave had essentially the same issue, and (rightfully) received a lot of shit for it.
If you don't have a confirmed contact/way to transfer funds, claiming to collect on their behalf is bordering on fraud IMO.
rysolv is holding money to solve a particular issue, until that money is claimed. if the issue is never solved, the money won't be claimed either. the problem what happens with the money is the same as if the issue is solved without anyone claiming it.
so presumably there needs to be a process for unclaimed money regardless.
brave was collecting money to give to the project as a whole for work already done. they didn't expect that it would be rejected or remain unclaimed.
But this could definitely be a problem if the site grows and I don't have enough time to track down people.
Another suggestion I've had for abandoned funds is to redistribute across the repo. i.e. A $100 issue for OBS was closed/abandoned/etc, so the $100 is split and the remaining OBS issues get $100/n added to the bounty.
Adding to this [1] bug report, when I change pages using the numbered buttons at the bottom of the issues listing and then press the Back button of my browser it takes me back to HN. Navigating back should instead take me back to the previous-numbered page of the issues list.
For usability, please also consider not requiring people to scroll to the bottom of the listing to change pages.
Also, is it limited to GitHub? There are a few bugs in Firefox that I would pay to see fixed but AFAIK FF dev isn't on GitHub for example.