Paul, excellent points!
saborion2, the bounty system does not work that way. Bounties are NOT paid until the project is completed meeting all of the guidelines and reviewed to ensure such. Also, there is no way (nor is any planned) to allow potential bounty candidates to talk directly to bounty sponsors, as this may allow them to circumvent the bounty process for a product they never release. The possible worth of such a bounty can be suggested in it's supporting thread - but that does not mean that worth will be assigned to the bounty - nor does it mean that the bounty will ever reach that amount.
In numerous cases, the bounty winners are receiving a token amount of what their efforts are worth. If you visit
Paul Smedley's Pages, you will see dozens of projects he is active in - many of which we cannot live without (such as MySQL, PHP, ffMPEG, cURL, VirtualBox, Samba, Ghostscript, Perl, Gnash, CUPS, PostgreSQL, Python, WGet, Apache - to name a few) - yet he has only recieved bounties for few of them - and the amounts have usually been more "tokens of appreciation" than "payment for what his efforts were worth"
In some cases, we have been lucky to have dedicated programmers like Paul, who have actually completed and released the work to everyone - and then been rewarded with the bounty, as opposed to the method you are alluding to of seeing a bounty and getting paid for it to do the work (which will not happen). Bounties (in part - or in full) are not paid until the work is complete and reviewed and determined to be meeting the bounty requirements.
In addition, though not stipulated in the bounties themselves, the following additional requirements also apply: If the software is a port, the "porter" must have the rights to do both the port and the release. Inotherwords, as a for instance, when I was in contact with IBM and writing various bits of code, IBM provided me with source that I could incorporate and use in my applications - as well as ones I could not.
So, as another for instance, if IBM provided a business partner with code to allow them to port it and release it (or make it available to IBM for release), that would qualify when the other aspects of the bounty were released.
BUT, if IBM provided that code to a Business Partner to use for their own internal projects or a specific client list (such as "please port this for Customer A/Project A, who needs it") it would NOT qualify for a bounty - even if all other criteria were met, as any release/usage other than in the example would violate contracts, copyrights and other IP laws. OS2WF will not pay out a bounty to assist someone in the commission of a crime.
Another scenario that would not qualify is if someone was provided (or bought or acquired or whatever) a copy of a certain piece of software and "hacked" it, recompiled it (without permission) or otherwise modified it to run on OS/2 - which again, even if it met the other bounty criteria, would not be eligible for the same reasons as the previous point.
I hope that answers your questions... if not let us know.
Robert