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.