Hi all,
if you are sponsoring or have suggested a bounty in the past, or if you are a developer who is working (or has worked) on a bounty, you are invited to share your thoughts on a couple of questions here.
Q1) Unclaimed bounties
We have a couple of bounties that literally started "years ago" where money is stocked but nothing happened so far.
The general question is: Should this money stay there forever? Shall there be a "timeout" for a bounty (e.g. 24 months)?
Meaning: If during that time, nobody started working on a software and can provide at least a prototype, then the bounty is closed in an "unclaimed" status. ..which leads us to question 2:
Q2) Unclaimed money
If we close bounties and there is already money available... what are the options?
- return the exact amount of money sponsored to the respective people?
- let each of the original sponsors decide on different project(s) that should receive a bounty "top-up" ?
- put the money in a "jackpot" pool that will be equally distributed across the remaiming bounties?
Q3) Claimed bounties
What happens if someone claims a bounty... but none of the original sponsors is available (any longer) to agree and approve the payment? Who takes the decision whether or not to pay?
Q4) Deadlines for work-in-progress
In the case where someone comes up and says "don't cancel that bounty, I am working on it", what is the time he should be allowed to continue working on it? Endless? In other words: Until *when* would he/she have to deliver *what* in order to keep the bounty alive?
The reason for these questions is that when it comes to money, people can get very uncomfortable and upset.
Nobody has money to burn. If people get money which they don't deserve (in other peoples opinion) the whole system becomes counter-productive. Unfortunately, the bounty rules make no statement on what happens in the cases mentioned above.
Also, as you might all be aware, there is a project that made significant process and could use some money to make the last mile.
At the same time, we have bounties with money lying around - as said for quite some time already - where nothing happens.
To get an impression, go to
www.os2world.com/bounties and have a look at the paragraph "Bounty System - Open". Note however that not all of them are inactive, some just need a decision...

while others are effectively "dead".
My personal interest here is to see if my "TrueCrypt port" bounty can be cancelled.
(see
http://www.os2world.com/content/view/330/71/ )
I suggested this bounty and I also sponsored some bucks here. Apparently nobody ever started working on this, therefore I would like to see that money (at least my part) being given to the Qt-porting bounty.
Let me know what you think.
Thomas