Bounties Damage Open Source Projects
September 14, 2023
Authors: Andrew Kelley and Loris Cro
Please don't use bounties to incentivize Zig development.
This blog post is inspired by this GitHub issue from three days ago: Support WASIX (see also)
Here are some reasons why we believe bounties are a poor form of sponsorship when it comes to software development:
- Bounties foster competition at the expense of cooperation.
- Bounties are an utterly simplistic way of dealing with the business management side of creating software:
- Instead of scouting for a suitable candidate, you're letting battle royale dynamics pick a winner for you, at the expense of everybody who's going to lose the competition.
- Instead of creating a clear contract where you take on some of the risk, you implicitly put the entirety of the risk on the contestants (eg partial solutions don't get any payout).
- Instead of allocating time and resources to proper due diligence, you instead penalize any form of thoughtfulness in favor of reckless action (eg a solution just needs to pass a test suite).
- Instead of planning for the full lifecycle of software, which also includes maintenance, you end up with a quickly bitrotting artifact that is of no practical use to anybody.
- Instead of spreading unease to all the people involved, it would be preferable you instead learned how to do business properly.
- On projects less radical than Zig, you might also put pressure on the development team to accept the winning submission, which, given the above, will probably not be the most well-thought-out and maintainable solution.
While we do understand that continued exposure to venture capital might have caused some to build an appreciation for endless rat racing, we kindly request that you keep unwarranted hustling away from the Zig community.
We're not only building free and open source software but, most importantly, we're building software you can love and this can only be done by employing well-designed business management processes.
A Word About Bug Bounties
We do believe that bug bounties, like the one offered by TigerBeetle, can be a virtuous way of sponsoring development since they focus on the discovery aspect of software defects. Yes, it's possible for different people to independently discover the same bug, but that's an unlucky coincidence, not a structural aspect of the resulting system.
If you're interested in investing in the Zig ecosystem, we're happy to chat with you and give you all the necessary insight both when it comes to the project's roadmap, and also in terms of publicizing the opportunity within the community to help you find a suitable candidate, but we do expect that you treat your collaborators with the respect they deserve.
For more info, contact Loris Cro (VP of Community) at loris@ziglang.org.