I'm wondering if for bigger bounty projects like virtualbox, if maybe the bounty should be released partially with milestones.
For example, Paul Smedley did a good amount of work initially getting it started. Maybe he should have received a % of the bounty so he gets something for starting he project.
Just seems like it would encourage more work since people don't have to do everything to get something back.
FWIW I did very little actual work on virtualbox other than to compile it. The OS/2 specifics were (at the time) available in svn.