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Description

Bounties are usually offered as an incentive for fixing software bugs or implementing minor features.¹ Bounty driven development is one of the business models for open-source software. The compensation offered for an open-source bounty is usually small.²

Examples of bounties

• 2023: The Prettier Challenge³ 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.⁴
• 2018: Mozilla Firefox's WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communications) bug was submitted by Education First to Bountysource for $50,000.⁵
• Sun MicroSystems (now owned by Oracle Corporation) has offered $1 million in bounties for OpenSolaris, NetBeans, OpenSPARC, GlassFish, OpenOffice.org, and OpenJDK.⁶
• 2004: Mozilla introduced a Security Bug Bounty Program, offering $500 to anyone who finds a "critical" security bug in Mozilla.⁷
• 2015: Artifex Software offers⁸ 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.⁹¹⁰
• RISC OS Open bounty scheme to encourage development of RISC OS¹¹
• 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

References

1. Kanda, T.; Guo, M.; Hata, H.; Matsumoto, K. (2017). Towards understanding an open-source bounty: Analysis of bountysource. 2017 IEEE 24th International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER). IEEE. pp. 577–578. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315639032 ↩

2. Zhou, J.; Wang, S.; Zhang, H.; Chen, T.H.P.; Hassan, A.E. (2021). "Studying backers and hunters in bounty issue addressing process of open source projects". Empirical Software Engineering. 26 (4). Springer: 1–36. doi:10.1007/s10664-021-09979-z. S2CID 254472802. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10664-021-09979-z ↩

3. "The Prettier Challenge". Algora, Public Benefit Corporation. 30 October 2023. Retrieved 11 February 2024. https://algora.io/challenges/prettier ↩

4. "Biome formatter wins the Prettier challenge". Biome. 27 November 2023. Retrieved 11 February 2024. https://biomejs.dev/blog/biome-wins-prettier-challenge/ ↩

5. "Bountysource, Education First increase Mozilla WebRTC bounty to a whopping $50,000!". CanYa Blog. 2019-10-08. Archived from the original on 2019-10-08. Retrieved 2024-01-21. https://web.archive.org/web/20191008103829/https://blog.canya.com/2018/05/03/bountysource-education-first-increase-mozilla-webrtc-bounty-to-a-whopping-50000/ ↩

6. Shaun Nichols (30 January 2008). "Sun sets $1 million open source bounty". iTnews.com.au. nextmedia. Retrieved 11 June 2022. https://www.itnews.com.au/news/sun-sets-1-million-open-source-bounty-102229 ↩

7. Linda Rosencrance (3 August 2004). "Brief: Mozilla offers bounty for bugs". Computerworld. Retrieved 11 June 2022. https://www.computerworld.com/article/2566687/brief--mozilla-offers-bounty-for-bugs.html ↩

8. "Ghostscript: Bug bounty program". Retrieved 14 July 2015. http://www.ghostscript.com/Bug_bounty_program.html ↩

9. "Amiga.org - Kickstart ROM Replacement (Phase II) Assigned". Archived from the original on 6 December 2010. Retrieved 14 July 2015. https://web.archive.org/web/20101206191839/http://www.amiga.org/forums/printthread.php?t=55226 ↩

10. "Kickstart ROM Replacement (Phase II)". Retrieved 14 July 2015. http://www.power2people.org/projects/profile/6 ↩

11. "RISC OS Open: All bounties". Retrieved 14 July 2015. http://www.riscosopen.org/bounty/ ↩