Open-source bounty

An open-source bounty is a monetary reward for completing a task in an open-source software project.

Description

Bounties are usually offered as an incentive for fixing software bugs or implementing minor features. Bounty driven development is one of the business models for open-source software. The compensation offered for an open-source bounty is usually small.

Examples of bounties

• 2023: The Prettier Challenge to write a Rust program that would pass 95% of Prettier test suite was completed within 3 weeks and awarded $22,500 to Biome contributors.
• 2018: Mozilla Firefox's WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communications) bug was submitted by Education First to Bountysource for $50,000.
• Sun MicroSystems (now owned by Oracle Corporation) has offered $1 million in bounties for OpenSolaris, NetBeans, OpenSPARC, GlassFish, OpenOffice.org, and OpenJDK.
• 2004: Mozilla introduced a Security Bug Bounty Program, offering $500 to anyone who finds a "critical" security bug in Mozilla.
• 2015: Artifex Software offers up to $1000 to anyone who fixes some of the issues posted on Ghostscript Bugzilla.
• Two software bounties were completed for the Amiga AROS operating system, producing a free Kickstart ROM replacement for use with the UAE emulator and FPGA Amiga reimplementations, as well as original Amiga hardware.
• RISC OS Open bounty scheme to encourage development of RISC OS
• AmiZilla was an over $11,000 bounty to port the Firefox web-browser to AmigaOS, MorphOS & AROS. While the bounty produced little results it inspired many bounty systems in the Amiga community including Timberwolf, Power2people, AROS Bounties, Amigabounty.net and many more.

See also

• Bountysource
• Bug bounty program
• Business models for open-source software
• Crowdfunding
• Google Summer of Code