As far as incentives go, bounties are like contract programming, only coupled to the roulette of being rejected or gazumped, which dramatically reduces the effe

As far as incentives go, bounties are like contract programming, only coupled to the roulette of being rejected or gazumped, which dramatically reduces the effectiveness of the inducement. The main barrier I experience when contributing to open source projects is being ignored by the clique. If you're short on the time, energy, or disposition for joining the in-group, then set expectations low: feature PRs, and sometimes even simple bug-fixes, may go ignored for long periods, and receive only cursory attention. (There are exceptions to this. I'll call out three projects I remember for very positive interactions despite being a drive-through contributor: Dovecot IMAP, and Ruby on Rails, and, showing my age now, wu-ftpd). From my own experience, solutions to the social dynamics move the needle more than financial incentives. By which token I reckon the most effective agent of the last three decades was Github, but there is plenty more to do.