Bountysource.com - rewards for development
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Bountysource.com is a website which lets you send money to be rewarded when an issue/development of your choosing is fixed.
Libretro have started using their own patreon money on posting bounties, and so have their users. For example, I put some money on that annoying Mortal Kombat 2&3 sound issue in lr-mame2003.
I'm wondering how the community feels about getting involved in this for RetroPie, emulators, emulationstation and other Retropie-related coding projects?
I'm in two minds about it....
On the one hand, I think it's cool that developers get rewarded for hard work, and that users can feel like they have an option to promote an issue they're interested in, beyond 'nagging' about it (which is very difficult to do without being rude/demanding!). I think it could also help give people the nice feeling that they have participated in a particular improvement, even if they can't work on it themselves.
On the other hand, it could maybe create a different atmosphere around the project when you introduce money. Especially as with bountysource the money leaves your account as soon as you post a bounty, rather than when it is solved & claimed, so you could potentially pay for something that remains unfixed for a long time.. maybe forever!
Also, whilst money is a nice reward, RetroPie is a hobby everyone does in their spare time. Bounties are likely not enough to tear coders away from their relaxation, family, etc, so it should be seen as a sweetener rather than buying a code-slave :) Even a small code change can take hours to complete.
I'm interested to hear your thoughts! If the community and especially @BuZz thinks it's ok, perhaps I could make an instruction post on how to submit bounties, and what to expect.
But, until then: Please don't post any RetroPie bounties yet!
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@dankcushions I saw it on retroarch issue tracker and at first sight I thought it is cool. In fact, I posted a bounty on a cheevos related issue there. But, as you said, the money leaves your account as soon as soon as you post and remains on bountysource account until someone solve the issue. Add to this the fact that "If a developer wishes to cash out their balance there will be a 10% fee"... Then I started not seeing the bountysource with good eyes...
If it's to insert money in the project I prefer to make donations when I see something cool being implemented (or just to show my gratitude). Maybe a patreon account can be considered too.
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I think it certainly introduces a bias.
On one hand, it's a practical and fairly precise bug "upvoting" tool : the more money there is on a bug, the more users are desperatly willing it to be resolved, and it encourages the dev team to resolve those in priority.
First drawback : the bugs visible by users will probably be over-prioritized compared to low level (but crucial) ones.
On the other hand, it seems pretty unfair, more than 1 dev could work on resolving a problem : let's say that one modify/rewrite an API in order to correct a bug, and the second effectively correct it, where goes the money ?
It could definetely generate discord.TL;DR : I'm not really sure this is a good solution. I'd prefer donation I think.
The main factor for how well this could go is AMHA the community itself (users+devs) -
@meleu said in Bountysource.com - rewards for development:
Add to this the fact that "If a developer wishes to cash out their balance there will be a 10% fee"... Then I started not seeing the bountysource with good eyes...
i think this bit is fine - it is a very 'open source' project and it sounds like this 10% fee barely covers costs.
If it's to insert money in the project I prefer to make donations when I see something cool being implemented (or just to show my gratitude). Maybe a patreon account can be considered too.
yes i would hate to see the donations suffer if people instead spend more on bounties. on-going costs of retropie (website, hosting, etc) would not be covered by bounties as they are not trackable 'issues'.
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@dankcushions The fact that they keep the money till the issue is solved made me believe that they invest this money in some way to make even more money. That made me look at them with a certain suspicion.
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I'm not a fan of the idea. Anytime money gets involved things get stupid. People feel they are owed something and people are demanding enough as they are. If we had more developers consistently contributing to the codebase it might make more sense but with how few people there are that contribute the demands would probably continue to go to them (him).
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@meleu said in Bountysource.com - rewards for development:
@dankcushions The fact that they keep the money till the issue is solved made me believe that they invest this money in some way to make even more money. That made me look at them with a certain suspicion.
i think it would be harder doing it any other way, though. they're essentially acting as an 'escrow' here.
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@herb_fargus said in Bountysource.com - rewards for development:
If we had more developers consistently contributing to the codebase it might make more sense but with how few people there are that contribute the demands would probably continue to go to them (him).
agreed. plus i think it could put BuZz in a difficult position of having to say no to changes he doesn't want/isn't happy about, yet that developer needing his 'ok' before the bounty could be claimed.
perhaps if we encouraged it for libretro emulator issues only?
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@dankcushions since a good portion of retropie uses libretro stuff and they already have bounties I don't see why we couldn't encourage people to place their bounties there. Im tempted to put in a bounty for bluemsx to enable colecovision support as a core option
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Stupid idea, but why don't we launch a Patreon or something?
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@itsnitro same reasons I mentioned above
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You can't compare the two. One is people paying money to get a feature they want (for example) while the other is donating an amount of money each month for ANY reason (I.e a reward system isnt necessary, and it could be made clear supporting the Patreon project guarantees nothing).
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@robertybob semantics. Fact is people feel and act entitled when they put money in it (and plenty who don't as well!). Anyways it's not my decision to make. But I've voiced my feelings on the matter. RetroPie has never been about money for me.
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I agree that bringing in the money aspect radically changes the dynamics of participating in a project. It becomes more of a job, and less of a hobby.
Also, development is not an individual activity, and for me the greatest thing is to involve other devs in discussions for design and end-users for testing of new stuff. Basically trying to get as many people as possible on board.
Who gets the bounty in that case?
And as mentioned above, this heavily favors user-facing functions, while structural or framework improvements are a lot less likely to attract bounties. That will lead to low-quality code in the long term.
So all in all, I agree with the sentiment that @meleu expressed, this seems a business model focused on cashing in on the open-source development process, by monetizing a ranked issue tracker. But what problem do they actually solve?
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@Zigurana said in Bountysource.com - rewards for development:
I agree that bringing in the money aspect radically changes the dynamics of participating in a project. It becomes more of a job, and less of a hobby.
i would say that IMO the amounts of money we're talking about tend to be relatively low and a fraction of what my hourly rate would be in my job, and i'm not that well paid :) it's more like beer money. maybe that says more about the price of beer...
Also, development is not an individual activity, and for me the greatest thing is to involve other devs in discussions for design and end-users for testing of new stuff. Basically trying to get as many people as possible on board.
Who gets the bounty in that case?
agreed. i'm not sure how it works in that case. i think most issues are mostly solved by one person, though.
And as mentioned above, this heavily favors user-facing functions, while structural or framework improvements are a lot less likely to attract bounties. That will lead to low-quality code in the long term.
i don't agree with that. this hasn't happened in libretro at all. like i said, the amounts of money we're talking about aren't that alluring. ultimately people still work on what they want to work on. i don't even think putting a bounty neccesarily gets an issue fixed any quicker, unless it was really disproportionate. the biggest i've seen in libretro is $100+ to make an psx dynarec... that must be 10s of hours of work for an experienced asm programmer. not worth it unless you're already interested.
So all in all, I agree with the sentiment that @meleu expressed, this seems a business model focused on cashing in on the open-source development process, by monetizing a ranked issue tracker. But what problem do they actually solve?
it's not a con or a cash in. that's very unfair. you should read my previous link.
i think i'm warming to just alerting users to posting bounties on just the libretro stuff, as that seems to be generally acceptable.
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@dankcushions said in Bountysource.com - rewards for development:
So all in all, I agree with the sentiment that @meleu expressed, this seems a business model focused on cashing in on the open-source development process, by monetizing a ranked issue tracker. But what problem do they actually solve?
it's not a con or a cash in. that's very unfair. you should read my previous link.
I'm not suggesting its a con at all, nobody is tricked into doing anything, I just don't think they have a valid business model.
Again, what value are they adding to open source development?
They are facilitating end-users to 'vote with their money' on what developers should/could look at. I'm not convinced that helps to set better priorities, nor that it leads to better SW.But hey, I dont own a business, so what do I know?
It's not like we can stop them anyways, nor developers from operating under the lure of such a bounty.
As long as we continue judging PR's on their merits, it doesn't matter where the dev's motivation comes from.</shrug>
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Monney in this project is worths
Money in this type of project is a bad idea. It does not motivate developers, but it gives the possibility to the end user to be more demanding ... The retrogaming for me is a passion, I made an improvement on the emulator pcsx rearmed for me and for the Community I developed a bomberman multiplayer for my friends and after a few tests of their, I decided to share it with the community retropie. I have another project in the oven, the backup of a flash game which the company has nothing to do (more update, more ways to buy games, abandoned forum ... ), i cut some screeshot, i start to write the code. i don't wan't to be payed for that, for me it's a share. -
I've decided to donate $10 each time there's a new version announced in the news section. I've done so since I got my first RPI2 back in 3.0, and I even did it for 3.2.1 between 3.2 and 3.3. I think there's been 13 versions worth mentioning in the news. That's $130, less than $8 per month. And I honestly think Retropie is a better "service" than the more expensive Spotify.
Thank you very much for your hard work and for making my life a little bit happier!!!
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@Arcuza thanks!
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