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Simon Willison’s Weblog

Bounty Hunting

Via Jeremy Hylton, Mark Shuttleworth (super-rich geek and space tourist) is offering $100,000 worth of bounties in 2004 to developers willing to help out with a number of Open Source projects, most of which are to be developed in Python. A comparison can be made here with Mitch Kapor, another geek-done-well who funds open source development through his sponsorship of the Open Source Applications Foundation.

Personally I think this is a great way of funding open source development, although a counter-argument is that this kind of reward could encourage the wrong kind of attitude within the open source community with programmers dedicating their time to paid projects at the expense of others. I don’t see this happening—people work on open source projects for the love of doing so and to scratch an itch. If you have the money to spend and want to offer it up as a bounty for someone to further develop a product you like then more power to you! I would certainly consider doing so if some freak incident left me rolling in cash (very unlikely to happen considering my complete disinterest in nursing my finances).

Posted 5th December 2003 at 2:48 am

This is Bounty Hunting by Simon Willison, posted on 5th December 2003.

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3 comments

  1. Most of the bounty money will probably go to Schooltool, an open source school administration package based on Zope3, Twisted and other good stuff.

    Tom Hoffman - 5th December 2003 03:44 - #

  2. Hi. It is very good to spend his money in so usefull projects. We need more people like this!!! CU EgonB from

    EgonB - 5th December 2003 14:50 - #

  3. Logically, you'd think the presence of funded development would cause a sense of entitlement among open source programmers. After all, why code for free if you can find a way to get a grant to pay for your pet project? Furthermore, why code at all if you can hold your code hostage for payment? Those arguments have been around for years. While grant programs like this should not be taken lightly, the history of these kinds of grants is pretty positive on the whole. The Perl Foundation has a reasonably good record here, with its first grants announced back in 2000. The PSF is starting to build up a nice bit of dough that they're spending intelligently on Python (mostly by encouraging conferences like PyCon DC). Other open source foundations (Gnome, Apache) exist without engendering a sense of entitlement, or changing the nature of open source development. So while these counter-arguments make sense in the abstract, they are not supported when you look at our history.

    ziggy - 6th December 2003 23:42 - #

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