Bug Bounties

[crank]

Marcel,

Are there any bug bounties for anything that you are aware of, I know you are working hard, but I am wondering if there is a way to have the community put their money where their mouth is. I would like to submit bugs as bounties and have people commit dollars via paypal for certain bugs/bounties to be solved and then whoever fixes it, collects the bounty from the manager of the account. I know this works great in other rapid development communities. Would you be interested if we tried it here?

[trey_loco]

I really like this idea. I think it could be a win/win for both sides.

[DPK]

I don't think you'll see this happening. It's an interesting idea, but I think the developers are going to try to retain some control over the source in an effort to make it more commercialized in the end.

I can't remember the details, but I think that's the overall end goal.

[Sniperking]

Im not sure arn't all bugs fixed internally by boxee devs?

[cewan]

I don't think you'll see this happening. It's an interesting idea, but I think the developers are going to try to retain some control over the source in an effort to make it more commercialized in the end.

I can't remember the details, but I think that's the overall end goal.

That is a horrible end goal. I am leaving Boxee now...

[DPK]

That is a horrible end goal. I am leaving Boxee now...

I'm not saying they're going to charge you for boxee. I doubt that will ever happen. You probably always be able to download and stick boxee on whatever device you want. Just that they are probably going to retain control of their source and license it in the end. By commercialized I am referring to the licensing of their product to 3rd party set top box companies that might want to use boxee as the backend.

It's not a horrible goal to want to make a profit. If you think they are doing this to make no profit stop kidding yourself.

[crank]

There are ways to open source the code to a wider community and also be able to sell licenses to hardware vendors who want the tech for their devices. I would think a larger discussion is in order probably offline and with legal counsel if this has not already been done, in order to figure out the particulars and speed up the development cycle. I am sure Apple is throwing a crazy amount of resources at front row and ATV to duplicate the functionality of Boxee. Make no mistake, the dev cycle has to speed up or in a year no one will even remember Boxee existed.

[DPK]

It's really too early to tell what they are doing. The entire project is in it's early stages still. So everything we say is speculative.

[tsella]

boxee is f/oss software released under the gpl and will remain so.

patches/contributions are always welcome, and if someone feels there is a merit in a bounty for fixing an issue, so be it.

this is open source, we have no claim for control except for having official releases, and we will not necessarily include a submitted patch if we don't think we should (be it for code quality, risk of breaking other things, or otherwise), as it is done in pretty much most open source projects with direction.

if we see any bounty for something we are already fixing, we will notify the person offering it. if we see anyone doing exceptional work in fixing stuff, bounty or bountyless, heck, we might offer the person a job or outsource to them :)

[DPK]

And there you have it.

[bstag]

boxee is f/oss software released under the gpl and will remain so.

patches/contributions are always welcome, and if someone feels there is a merit in a bounty for fixing an issue, so be it.

this is open source, we have no claim for control except for having official releases, and we will not necessarily include a submitted patch if we don't think we should (be it for code quality, risk of breaking other things, or otherwise), as it is done in pretty much most open source projects with direction.

if we see any bounty for something we are already fixing, we will notify the person offering it. if we see anyone doing exceptional work in fixing stuff, bounty or bountyless, heck, we might offer the person a job or outsource to them :)

Access to current code base may go a long way towards making this happen. Not just a zipped up version of month old stuff but something that is actively being worked on. Read only of course. That way the people who even have a clue can work on things wrong right now not things you fixed last week. Example the crappy call to py run string in the windows dll wrapper that is bad in the current code base. I am sure anyone who is working on this with windows has fixed it. Submitting a bug fix now would be crazy unless i can look at the current code base and see you are only passing one parameter to the dll instead of the 4 required.

Edit: I don't submit bugs or anything like that currently since I am running a custom compiled version for windows using the the most recent code base available with numerous things fixed/changed so it can work.