Their terms of service [1] are also highly questionable. They reserve the right to take all the money in our account, or cancel our bounties without refunding our money, at any time and without any explanation, without cause or notice (section 6.5). "Without cause" seems like a pretty good place for us to draw a line....Daniel Foré should probably be the one who we should alert.
OK, I've CCed Daniel to make sure he's aware about the issues with Bountysource's ToS. It's probably not a huge risk, but it would not be fun to be wrong about that....
We don't use it ourselves. However, I am intrigued if people believe that we should put out bounties? What I get a lot of times and you've seen this yourselves is that a lot of bugs are complex and takes a lot of intimate knowledge of the GTK+ or GNOME stack. Would it be effective? sri
I think it could be effective, but it's something that would really require strategic discussion to decide which bugs to place bounties on, and how large the bounty. Presumably we would get better at this with experience. I suspect that the most effective approach would be to identify high-profile bugs that are not attracting sufficient developer attention (e.g. the bad search experience in nautilus), and try to guess the appropriate amount of money that will incentivize work on the bug. Adam's $400 bounty for what appeared to be a simple crash actually required digging into the webkitgtk+ sandboxing code, which basically limited the bug to those who already have at least some webkit experience. It did work in the end when it attracted my attention, but that took a while. My $150 bounty on the gnome-shell desktop background bug hasn't been successful yet; it probably wasn't large enough to motivate anyone unfamiliar with gnome-shell to look into the problem. I figured a smaller amount of money would be appropriate since it's probably a fairly simple issue and I pointed out a commit that I thought was wrong. Maybe someone will work on it in the end, but I have a feeling it will end up being solved by an experienced gnome-shell developer, and I guess the bounty will probably not be significant motivation for doing so. My $250 bounty on the gnome-shell calendar bug seems to have been just right, though: that bug wasn't getting any attention and wouldn't have been fixed without the bounty, and now it's very likely to be resolved soon.
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