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Comment by 999900000999 | Hacker News Reader

I would love a bounty system built in to GitHub. If I find an issue in an open source project, I should be able to offer up to whatever amount of money for the maintainer to fix it.

Assuming said maintainer accepts it, they'd be obligated to at least try and fix the issue. Issue. If the issues insurmountable, then maybe give me half my money back.

When someone opens an issue on your open source project, there's no way to tell if it's some 19-year-old trying to write her first script or a 38-year-old FAANG engineer who doesn't want to do their own job.

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This is incentivizing projects to write buggy code or be lax about fixing things. Because if projects don't continue to get issues to resolve they don't get further funding. Your heart is in the right place but incentive systems like this historically don't work out in the end. You need to incentivize people who get value from the project to pay money for it.

There were a few companies that tried doing that, if I recall correctly https://www.bountysource.com/ was one of them (seems to still be active). I've been following the area and also tried to run a business in the area. My experience is that while there's some demand, it's either really small, or extremely difficult to grow.

The thing that makes me a bit nervous about bounties is that they can add some weird incentives: maintainers may feel that NOT promptly fixing a bug that affects big companies is a strategic way to get a bounty to fix it!

It could cause that, but I'm more thinking about strange edge cases .

If I write a quick utility in my spare time, and your multi-billion dollar company needs to deploy it on 1,000 devices, I don't want to fix your issues for free.

To be honest, it's about time for these big companies to write a check.

Sometimes not swiftly moving to resolve a reported bug allows the work to proceed in tandem with other, deeper concerns the maintainers have but the reporter does not share.

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