http://freedomsponsors.org is a crowdfunding platform for Open Source projects.

This is how it works:

1) Someone places a bounty for a problem (tipically an issue registered on an issue tracker)

2) More people might want to sponsor the same issue

3) A developer solves the issue

4) The sponsors verify the solution and pay the developer

The FreedomSponsors website itself is an open source web application, written in Django. Funny fact - some of its own issues have been sponsored in the website.

The source code - along with instructions on how to run it - can be found on Github. https://github.com/freedomsponsors/www.freedomsponsors.org

Hi Tony! Sorry, getting to this late. freedomsponsers.org looks totally in line with what I was imagining. I presume you built it, so thanks! I hope it gets traction.

[Totally unsolicited... I'd vote to change it's name. I know it seems silly/shallow but I thought of a million and a half things that it might be before I clicked he link, and none of them were even close to what it is. (Mostly I would have assumed it to be a Koch Brothers fundraising organization)]

I'm not convinced Oracle (ORCL), listed on both the S&P-500 and the NASDAQ-100, needs or will accept bug fixing donations, especially since MySQL is a competitor to their flagship Oracle DB and there was quite a lot of disgruntlement around the acquisition. Maybe if you gave money to MariaDB it would work.

Agreed, fuck 'em (not that you were saying that, but I am). My point was I want something like this for projects and bugs I care about in general. I don't care about this bug, but can relate to the cake-maker.

To anyone not yet familiar, Maria is a really exciting fork of MySQL - https://mariadb.org/

Do you have some info about MariaDB adoption rates?

It's recently replaced mysql in redhat builds, so it's definitely on the up.

    > It's recently replaced mysql in redhat builds, so it's definitely on the up.

"Red Hat's Director of Product Marketing, Mark Coggin, told various media outlets that the company has not made any decision or made an announcement about which database technology will be in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7."

-- "Red Hat Says No MariaDB/MySQL Decision Made." The H Online, 18 June 2013 (http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Red-Hat-says-no-Maria...)

And in OpenSuse, Arch and Slakware. Looks like to me the trend is set.

Oracle might not accept bug fixing donations. But it should accept bug fixing patches from an independent developer. And that developer might accept a bug fixing donation.

That's where a service like http://freedomsponsors.org comes in handy ;-)

> MySQL is a competitor to their flagship Oracle DB

Does it really? I mean, sure, they are both RDBMS's, but that's a pretty broad market. Are there really that many use cases where, with the current market, people who are using MySQL would have Oracle as their next choice or vice versa?

I can see an argument that MySQL competes with some of the same products that Oracle DB competes with (but in different market segments than where Oracle DB does), but I don't see them as directly competitive in any significant sense.

To me, that's kind-of like saying the MacBook Air is a competitor to Apple's flagship MacBook Pro. They're two different products, made by the same company, doing pretty much the same thing but designed for different use cases. It's the way I always felt about Oracle vs. MySQL, even back before Oracle owned MySQL, that they are two different RDBMS platforms designed for two different use cases.

These days, that line may be blurred a little bit, and you can see how both paradigms (and more!) can be combined into a single product with PostgreSQL, but I feel like the MacBook analogy really sums up the way I feel about these two systems.

My project is in that position. We have access to an Oracle site license so we use it. However, we're considering move to a "competing" db, probably postgresql or mysql.

I'm not a certified DBA so take this with a grain of salt, but it seems that any non-trivial use of Oracle systems ramp up in cost very quickly. Both in terms of hard cash and time in education/training.

> We have access to an Oracle site license so we use it. However, we're considering move to a "competing" db, probably postgresql or mysql.

Good point; I was considering mostly the situation where there isn't something already on hand, but it makes sense that there would be quite a lot of times where MySQL and Oracle DB are considered alternatives for a new project/application by shops who already have an existing installation of one or the other.

Given there are more engineers working on MySQL now than any time in its history, I think Oracle is pretty committed to it. MySQL is about fast, OracleDB is about enterprise. A great many companies will run MySQL for things like web applications (especially those that need scale) while running the critical internal systems on OracleDB.

I don't think the MBPro/MBAir comparison is quite right. I think it's more like MBAir versus Mac Pro: it is very easy to see a single person having both of them and utilizing both of them extensively.

> Are there really that many use cases where, with the current market, people who are using MySQL would have Oracle as their next choice or vice versa?

RDS users?

Fortunately, lots of people other than Oracle work on the MySQL code. They would be susceptible to bug fixing donations. Hell, you could outright hire a Percona consultant.

Is this what you're thinking of? https://www.bountysource.com/

Nice. I signed up, but it doesn't look like there's much listed. Also, there doesn't seem to be a way to search for bounties to work on?!

Open bounties are listed on the project pages: https://www.bountysource.com/#trackers/48759-jshint

Some others:

https://www.catincan.com/

http://bountyoss.com/

http://funding.openinitiative.com/

In development: https://snowdrift.coop/

There are companies which you can pay to produce mysql fixes you specify. One of which is Percona. Won't be as cheap as gittip or something similar, but you'll get the results without relying on a bug hitting the top of someone elses' priority list.

So Percona is able to create a customized fork of MySQL for you? won't that create a maintenance problem in the future? I mean, you won't be able to get official update releases anymore.

Percona already runs their own MySQL fork. (http://www.percona.com/software/percona-server) They include various patches that their customers have asked for and also update it every time Oracle releases a new MySQL version.

Would be cool if you could submit an automated test and your bounty was automatically awarded as soon as the test passes.

A little risky though, if your test is imperfect. People may work to outsmart the tests rather than actually solve the bugs.

Yes, I was going to add a note on that but then I realized this problem (people cheating) would exist anyways as long as there isn't a trusted third party to handle conflicts. I don't think this would be a common issue though as most open source developers are not driven by the money and I don't think there would be enough money to attract scammers (would someone really get into the trouble of writing an open source software hoping to one day cheat people out of their money when they submit bug bounties?).

You can try FreedomSponsors - http://www.freedomsponsors.org/

Have you tried (politely) emailing a core dev? That could work.

You mean sending a polite email offering a couple hundred dollars to fix a bug? I haven't. In addition to seeming tacky, I think the idea behind a bounty system is that it provides a way to crowd-source the effort and I wonder if having more demonstrated skin in the game around key issues might help reduce bike-shedding, or better convey the tangible value an issue has to users.

It's interesting that you mention a feeling of "tackiness" with respect to directly funding something via a bounty system. Although my personal project [1] isn't necessarily about providing incentives to open source software development, I did recently launch a new subsection focused on motivating businesses to act out of a motive other than the profit motive alone.

The motivational approach I took was slightly different than crowdfunding. Instead of directly funding the tasks you want to see completed, the bounties are donations to charity made on behalf of the tasks. They can be either made immediately to establish your level of seriousness or made when the task completes, to provide ongoing motivation.

Since I am focused primarily on motivating city governments and businesses, I felt the same way as you: direct funding is not the right thing to do. These governments and businesses already have funds. If I want to sway their decision-making processes in some unusual way, my experiment is using public charitable donations.

Just as a demonstration, I just created a task for this (admittedly, not really what I have in mind for my site, but I'll take whatever eyeballs I can get) [2].

[1] https://www.brianstaskforce.com/

[2] https://business.brianstaskforce.com/task/385/oracle-address...

That's really cool! To be clear though, I felt it tacky to pick a core dev and email them directly as opposed to making a more public and transparent commitment in some other forum.

Still, I like your project quite a bit. Looks very nicely executed.

That makes sense. Thank you for the kind words, they are really appreciated!

Yes, that's what I meant. Why is it tacky? Sure, if there were a public "official" way to do so, it'd be preferable, but if you really need a Django bug fixed ASAP, there's nothing wrong with sending a nice email to a django core dev saying "Would you be open to fixing it soon, and we'll pay you $X?".

Open source developers don't bite, and they never say no to a bit of extra cash :)

Wait! Read "Drive" first. Open Source is a textbook example of people working for intrinsic motivation. While offering money might make that bug get fixed sooner, it very often reduces their drive to work on the open source project in the long run.

I can definitely see it having a negative effect. I don't do bounties anymore. It was too easy to get ripped off. They're basically a freelance gig with no guarantee of getting paid and no deposit to protect you when the person disappears after the work is done.

Thing is I likely would have done the work anyway. Bugs are community issues that effect everyone and contributing fixes for them keeps an open source project vibrant and active. But instead of feeling good about fixing some obscure bug I felt like I'd been used by someone who didn't want to pay for a developer.

Still feels icky to me. I'd rather this stuff be public and done in a way that the community and the rest of the core team know what's going on. I'd worry that backdoor payments done this way would negatively affect the spirit of how these projects are run.

Actually there are some OS devs who bark quite rudely that can be as bad as getting bitten.