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Ask HN: Is adding money to FOSS contributions toxic?
(Repost of previously buried submission)
Dear HN,
I run a commercial FOSS project and I've been wanting for some time to financially reward contributions from external contributors.
My idea was to set a "bounty pool" and add some money to it (based on the previous month's revenue and what we feel comfortable investing on).
Each contributor would be able to make a "contribution claim". On this claim, the contributor tells what he/she did that month, linking to PRs or screenshots that corroborate such claim.
Then, a maintainer assigns a number of "tickets" to the claim. The number of tickets depends on 1) the relative effort of the contribution(s) and 2) the impact that contribution had to the project.
(The relative effort would be calculated as "if one of our team members were to do it, how many hours would it take?").
After the month has ended, we run a small "lottery". Random tickets are selected, and each selected ticket is worth, say, $50 that the contributor can later cash-out using Bitcoin (or wire transfer with fees deducted).
This idea is well-intended, but my biggest fear is that it could make my community toxic. Contributors could possibly get overly competitive, or maybe upset because a claim did not reward as many tickets as one expected.
I do not know any open source project that does something like this. Things like Bountysource do not apply because they are centered around specific issues. Within our project, a contributor may help in different ways that do not necessarily translate to issues.
I have several questions regarding this "experiment", but maybe the most important ones are:
1 - Do you know any project that implements such reward system? Or maybe failed attempts?
2 - Do you believe adding money to open source contributions could demotivate contributors or create a toxic community?
I feel that's an interesting subject and I'd love to have HN's take on it. Cheers!
- cjbprime 9y agoThere's a paper about this, a bit old at this point, covers the toxic effect you describe: https://mako.cc/writing/funding_volunteers/funding_volunteers.html https://mako.cc/writing/funding_volunteers/funding_volunteer...
- dkLay 9y agoThat's exactly the kind of resource I've been looking for, thank you very much Edit: > based in part of the research and work done for a presentation on the subject given at the International Free Software Forum (FISL) given in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Oh, nice. The author presented the subject here in Brazil in 2004. If anyone reading this is from South America, FISL is a great event with great talks (though most of them in Portuguese). The organization is having some financial trouble for this year's edition, but hopefully they'll overcome it.
- kjksf 9y agoYou didn't say what your goal is. More code submitted? The fundamental problem of such schemes applied to open-source is that the money is pitiful compared to what a programmer can make. $50 is 30 mins worth of a decent SV programmer. So the money isn't worth it but by mere offering the money (i.e. external motivation) you destroy internal motivation. As cjbprime pointed out, this has been studied and it's generally believed that internal motivation is stronger that external motivation. I would focus on other things that can have a positive impact here. I don't know your project but there are things that open-source project maintainers often do badly. Some examples of things done badly: - no page with clear description of how to contribute to the project. What is expected of the contributor (e.g. before submitting PR, run tests by doing xxx), what contributor can expect the maintainer (the PR will be looked at within a week and either rejected or merged or changes will be requested), what are mechanics of contribution - no clear roadmap. Can a contributor get a sense of what are things that should be worked on in the short term - PRs linger for months without a comment Focus on making the process really smooth, prioritize contributions over your own work, be quick to trust and give people direct checkin access and rights to manage bugs, review PRs etc. That would probably have a bigger impact than complicated schemes of paying negligible amounts of cash.