Re: Of Bounties and Mercenaries

[Tom Lord <lord at emf dot net>]

Instead of bounties and mercenaries, a model which has occaisional
success but a long track record of that success being very limited and
narrowly focused, may I suggest instead the OSDL model?

>From a bird's-eye view, OSDL collects money from corporate sponsors
and uses that to help re-seed the Linux-kernel commons.  It takes on
and pays for tasks that no one contributor could individually afford
and that no downstream customer is going to want to pay for directly.
It "ties together" a great deal of the commercial activity around the
kernel.  It affords the sponsors a degree of protection against the
kernel project being usurped or fragmented.  It's a funded hub of
cooperation.

GCC may be too small a scope to make real progress on your general
idea and may already be situated in the commercial world in too
complex a way.  I think you'll have trouble differentiating from
commercial GCC developers while still finding enough paying
customers/contributors to make the effort worthwhile.  It might make
conceptual sense for the companies most interested in GCC to form an
OSDL-like entity -- but I think it's unlikely because, from the
perspective of those companies, based on past content on this list,
"if the SC system ain't broken, don't fix it."

Instead, a .org that worked on several different projects, including
GCC, and that was responsive to the kinds of issues typically
neglected by the vendor-developers, might actually have a chance of
collecting funding from everyone from individuals to global corps.

Antepenultimately: be wary of legal issues. To what entity will bounty
posters send money?  What will be the legal relationship between that
entity and bounty collectors?  The right to advertise/run the thing on
"gnu.org" domains should not be presumed.  Such a system would
interact with the FSF's 503(c) status in ways that need careful
attention.

Penultimately: history does not paint a promising picture.  Several
bounty/mercenary systems have come and most have gone.  None has been
a conduit for much money.  Doesn't mean it can't be done but people
have tried and not yet succeeded in any big way.  People generally
don't shop that way and, where these systems have succeeded in the
past, it looks to me like they succeeded by being a convenient conduit
for funding in a form that yields a larger tax break than the R&D tax
credits --- those conduits being sought sometimes for commercial
reasons (to fund development of free software that won't uniquely
benefit the funder or, perhaps, just to save money) and sometimes for
political reasons (to fund development of free software whose
political impact is hoped for, for which R&D tax credits might not
apply).  You might find that you can make more money selling t-shirts
if, overall, your entity is seen to be doing a lot of public good.

Ultimately: I gather you want to pool funds from people interested in
issues they can't afford to individually address.  I think that's a
true and good niche to fill.  But two suggestions: First: Don't nickle
and dime people --- asking them to earmark every penny rather than
just giving hints about their interests makes it too hard to send a
few bucks.  Second: if pooling _isn't_ your goal then you should bag
all this bounty stuff and just be a sole proprietor GCC consultant
(which, for all I know, you already are).

-t