What Bountysource can do for Open Source

My thoughts on Bountysource, a project that aims to help accelerate open-source software

Over at elementary, we have been using Bountysource to get more people interested in working with us. It works very much like bounty hunting, except we’re hunting bugs here. The idea is that anyone can offer a dollar-amount for a given bug on project-hosting websites such as GitHub or Launchpad, and then the person who eventually fixes the bug gets that same dollar-amount.

In fact, other people can join in the initial offer and thus accumulate somewhat large bounties for the most important bugs. In my view, Open Source projects can really benefit from this as both the users and the developers can gain from this development flow.

For those of you that know Gittip, Bountysource is quite similar, but I prefer Bountysource’s more direct approach to specific bugs, but I still think that Gittip is a very interesting project that everyone should be keeping an eye on.

Another advantage of Bountysource is that it allows us to easily prioritize bugs. No, I’m not saying that Open Source projects will only fix bugs that have a bounty attached to them. Instead, what I’m trying to say is that Bountysource can help teams figure out what their users are looking forward to the most in the midst of thousands of bug reports.

Having said all that, I’m really thrilled about the idea of Bountysource and how it will help elementary and other open source projects grow. Go ahead, sign in and start contributing!