

Gun.io Debuts Free Group Funding for Open Source Projects - Mizza
http://gun.io/blog/gunio-debuts-group-funding-for-open-source-projects/

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bad_user
Offtopic, but there's something really off about Gun.io

Looking at their listings under Freelance / Open Source, the prices offered
for those gigs are not even laughable, but an insult, even for developers from
third-world countries.

So am I missing anything? Do I need to be logged-in or something?

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jollyjerry
Always happy to see projects coming out of my hometown. I like the idea, but I
hope that there's good moderation for submitted bounties so it doesn't become
another Rent-a-Coder like cess pool. It's also be neat if the bounties could
be free form, so people could barter goods and services. Personally, being
offered $50 is worse than not being offered money at all for something that
I'd want to work on. On the other hand, for some tasks I wouldn't mind if
someone were willing to trade me design work, or treat me to a lunch or a
beer.

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Mizza
(I'm actually a Berkeley transplant, only moved here 3 weeks ago from Boston!)

The bartering goods and services idea is interesting, but it seems to only
work for local things. The one thing I think would be interesting to use that
for is for tutoring. I'd teach somebody Django if they could teach me Node,
etc..

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jollyjerry
Hope you enjoy the bay, if you haven't already, I highly recommend grabbing a
slice at cheeseboard.

In my experience, even mentoring works better in person.

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rgarcia
I could see GitHub adding this in the future, e.g. instead of simply voting
on/+1ing an issue, let people attach bounties. Is there proof, though, that
this is something people want? It seems like Kickstarter has the "funding for
big projects" thing nailed--I'm just wondering if there's really demand for
"funding for small features"...

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tectonic
There are projects that Kickstarter does not accept.

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rgarcia
Obviously, and my question is why? If they (or GitHub) could easily satisfy
demand for this, why haven't they?

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technomancy
Github is famous for having employees only work on projects that interest
them.

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cobychapple
"Winner takes all" implies that many more people will lose out.

Don't get me wrong: I think that gun.io's approach is potentially a great way
to get worthwhile stuff done on open source projects, but I'm also slightly
sceptical that this might see a 99designs-style model infect people's
mindshare more than it already does.

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sgricci
The Gun.io creator posted several bounties previously, which are still up.
Including several which are fixed or have fixes in his GitHub pull requests
(for LightWrite).

They haven't been closed so I assume the bounties haven't been paid. I get bad
feelings about this.

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Mizza
Remedied! There was one pending claim which I was still testing. The other
gigs have not had people actually submit claim requests for yet. I am a
'single founder' - lots of stuff to be done, that one didn't get sorted before
you saw it.

The hang up is that the people who claimed them didn't realize that
international payments aren't supported yet, unfortunately. (This is still is
causing some communication problems. I wish I had a better payment solution. I
have tried to make the language more clear.)

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grncdr
It took me a good 30 seconds _after_ reading this comment to find this on your
site. It's important info that really needs to be way more prominent than it
is, like on the front page.

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Mizza
Hmmm. I'm retooling the copy on the frontpage anyway, I'll work that in
somehow.

Thanks for the feedback!

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sethbuzz
Is the point of this to fund project like kickstarter? Because I think what
the FOSS community needs are much smaller, less marketable fixes and bounties.
Like 'port django to python3' not 'write a new FOSS video editor'.

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rwolf
The first subheader of the linked article is "Kickstarter for Open Source?"

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iamwil
I'm glad something like this exists, but the ramp up time to learn each
project seems way more effort than what it's worth for some of the bounties
that are being posted.

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czam
Guess that's the perfect reason why it should exist: People who are already
involved in existing projects could look out for low hanging fruits and that
would be a win-win. The site could implement a project alert.

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omouse
They should multiple payment methods, such as BitCoin.

