FreeBSD Bounties

[Hywel Mallett]

On 5 Mar 2009, at 19:59, james michael wrote:

> I find this completely useless as a site. No one is going to get  
> "flash 9 on freebsd with opera" for 200 dollars. I know people will  
> want to add bounties to it and it will be like 250 then like 300 and  
> as time passes it will be a million dollars or such but I don't  
> think the problem is that people aren't willing to do the work, its  
> that places like adobe has closed its software so that we can't  
> really create anything.
The scope of a bounty could be far wider than to get proprietary  
software to work with FreeBSD. It just happens that the two bounties  
so far are for compatibility with proprietary softwares.
For example, UFS quotas hadn't been updated to take account of large  
filesystems, so a bounty was offered, the fixes were made, and the  
bounty was claimed. The changes have gone back into the FreeBSD source  
(I think - they were certainly due to), so the FreeBSD project has  
benefited, and the bounty offerer and bounty hunter have benefited too.
Of course if there's not enough incentive for some things, or they are  
too hard or simply unfeasible, they won't happen. But bear in mind  
that bounties do get offered, and they do get fulfilled.
Hywel