reason 23 why we've moved to linux

[David Noel]

> This is a false analogy: they get paid.  Right now AFAIK no one is
> paid to work on FreeBSD ports, other than a handful of people paid
> to work on ports that affect their employer.

> There's no tangible reward for working on PRs in someone's "priority
> order".  From my previous experience as bugmeister, I can state that
> most people think their own problems _are_ the priority.  In a world
> where everything's a priority, nothing is.
>
> We don't have a stick we can beat the committers with if they don't
> do things in any particular order.  The most that we can reasonably
> do is to reset their maintainership, or reassign their PRs, if they
> become inactive.

I've never understood why we don't have the ability to attach bounties
to PR's. It seems like such a no-brainer solution to this whole mess.
While a $20 bounty (or maybe collectively $200) probably wouldn't
motivate a US-based developer to work on a PR that they were otherwise
not interested in there are plenty of people out there in the world
who it would. Elance is full of developers willing to work for a few
dollars an hour.

A quick Google search tells me that someone has started in this
direction already -- http://www.freebsdbounties.info/bounties. I think
it makes more sense for something like this to be integrated into the
existing PR system though.

"But who will build it?". I really don't know. I don't have time to.
Should I file a PR? ;-) Seriously though, if no one wants to volunteer
to build it it makes sense to me that the FreeBSD Foundation spend a
few thousand of those hundreds of thousands of dollars they collect
annually on something like this. But I haven't the slightest clue
who's in charge of that money or who I'd need to convince that
something like this would be useful. Bugs, features, etc.. why is
there no simple way to collectively fund them? It seems like so much
more would get done.

-David