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Comment by conartist6 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, has been tried a few times. I only followed Bountysource closely-ish, but they ended up taking a lot of money and then that money sat in bank accounts indefinitely because it often didn't lead to issues being fixed. I heard that eventually someone bought the company for peanuts and drained the bounty accounts, despite promising that they definitely wouldn't do that.

The problem as I see it is that a lot of those bounties are $2,000 for $20,000 worth of work, especially since they end up getting attached to the most gnarly bugs whose true solution involves deep refactoring or building essentially whole new products. Thus the maintainers need to be willing to support the features indefinitely, and they need to agree with the architecture of the solutions, and quite rapidly you start to understand why a little cash is not sufficient to solve the most intractable problems.

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Hello, and thank you for your feedback!

I appreciate your concerns, and we've thoroughly examined BountySource and learned valuable lessons from its challenges.

Our approach involves collaborating with corporations that already leverage open source projects for their enterprise software. By having these companies donate funds to critical issues, we anticipate larger sums being contributed to open source causes than might occur otherwise.

While we recognize that we don't have solutions for every challenge in this space, we firmly believe in the ongoing involvement of open source repository maintainers in our donation process. We are committed to innovation and plan to adapt and improve with the help of the community using our platform. We encourage the community to actively participate in finding solutions for these challenges, as we believe it can lead to a sustainable model that brings significant value in the long run.

Thank you again, and we welcome any additional feedback you may have.

Corporate speak is strong with this one.

I'm not sure you addressed the point: one-time donations do not solve the problem of companies trying to get free labor over time, even if they are larger donations. This is a problem that has to do with scoping, and setting the right expectations for companies, contributors, and maintainers.

Possibly related: some issues might be cool and interesting to work on while others are dull and boring. A lot of times the former becomes the later after getting passed the MVP stage. This might create an abundance of contributions that are flimsy, and that nobody wants to maintain over time for peanuts.

I think it's cool you all want to get this eventual community involved but you gotta provide the solutions to the most foundational challenges, otherwise how are you adding value in the market?

Hey, thanks for your thoughts!

We've put a lot of effort into thinking about potential issues and talking to potential users, but the real test will be when people start using our platform in the beta phase.

We have some ideas to solve problems, and we'll be trying them out gradually as we learn from the beta testers. Your feedback is really helpful, and we're sorry if we don't have all the detailed answers just yet. Thanks again!

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