bounties?

["Dr. Michael J. Chudobiak" <mjc avtechpulse com>]

Hi all,

What ever happened to gnome bounties? I've only followed this list for a 
year, but I see from the archives that there have been a variety of 
controversies about them - but nothing really definitive.

I think it would be useful to do some like:

1) Allow someone trusted (with commit access? foundation member? bug 
editor?) to flag a bug in bugzilla as 
so-annoying-I'll-pay-to-have-it-fixed (gnome-money vs gnome-love?).

2) Let a module maintainer vet the offer (to reject unwanted features or 
things that will be fixed soon anyway).

3) Have an l.g.o. list of active bounties.

4) Maybe pay through the Foundation (not sure about that).

Right now, we have big companies that can devote developers (Novell, Red 
Hat) or run formal bounty-esque programs (Google SOC), but nothing that 
can really tap the concerns of smaller organizations or individuals.

As an example, I use Gnome in my small company, and I've submitted 
plenty of small patches. But my skills are limited, and I can't devote 
that much time to fixing bigger things. But I could pay a few hundred 
dollars... bug 388152 is an example of something I'd pay for (make 
evince scale printed pages in a natural way).

Did the foundation come out against bounties on principal, or has the 
idea just not gone anywhere?


- Mike