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I think you actually might hurt the project by doing this. The main motivation for contributing to open source is altruism and/or the desire to contribute to s

I think you actually might hurt the project by doing this. The main motivation for contributing to open source is altruism and/or the desire to contribute to something meaningful and/or have something for your resume. By paying people, you make it about the money, and likely the money is far below what someone with the skills to really contribute could make. That gets them thinking not about the money and not about how fun it would be to contribute.

yellowapple 6y ago
I feel like this is a bit of a false dichotomy. For example, my reasons for my (relatively insignificant, but still) FOSS contributions include everything from altruism to scratching an itch to satisfying my intellectual curiosity. If I didn't have bills to pay, I'd probably be making a lot more FOSS contributions, and a lot more regularly. However, at the end of the day I do have bills to pay, so for better or worse the code I write ends up being the code that gets me paid. Right now this is from a day job. Bounties could instead position FOSS as the code that gets me paid. Maybe one of these days I'll have Patreon/Liberapay/etc. contributions sufficient to keep me afloat (or, for that matter, greater than $0), or my country would extract its cranium from its rectum and entertain the idea of a universal basic income, and then I can dedicate my time to whatever I wish, but today is unfortunately not that day. That is: the "conflicting" motivations of "money" v. "fun" ain't mutually exclusive. These are both "compensation", in a sense. If I'm already making contributions because they provide "fun", then said contributions only need to provide as much money as I'd need to save up money and not starve; anything beyond that is just gonna go toward fun anyway, which contributing to FOSS already (hopefully) provides.

yellowapple 6y ago

I feel like this is a bit of a false dichotomy. For example, my reasons for my (relatively insignificant, but still) FOSS contributions include everything from altruism to scratching an itch to satisfying my intellectual curiosity. If I didn't have bills to pay, I'd probably be making a lot more FOSS contributions, and a lot more regularly. However, at the end of the day I do have bills to pay, so for better or worse the code I write ends up being the code that gets me paid. Right now this is from a day job. Bounties could instead position FOSS as the code that gets me paid. Maybe one of these days I'll have Patreon/Liberapay/etc. contributions sufficient to keep me afloat (or, for that matter, greater than $0), or my country would extract its cranium from its rectum and entertain the idea of a universal basic income, and then I can dedicate my time to whatever I wish, but today is unfortunately not that day. That is: the "conflicting" motivations of "money" v. "fun" ain't mutually exclusive. These are both "compensation", in a sense. If I'm already making contributions because they provide "fun", then said contributions only need to provide as much money as I'd need to save up money and not starve; anything beyond that is just gonna go toward fun anyway, which contributing to FOSS already (hopefully) provides.