[mythtv-users] Per Card Volume Control Bounty started

[Brian Wood]

On Sep 7, 2006, at 12:11 PM, Isaac Richards wrote:

> On Thursday 07 September 2006 1:33 pm, Tom Lichti wrote:
>> Brian Wood wrote:
>>> I think what you are trying to do is well-intentioned but  
>>> impractical.
>>>
>>> $500 US is less than you could make flipping burgers at a Manhattan
>>> McDonalds for two weeks,  the actual value of performing such a
>>> project on the open market is probably closer to $5000 or probably
>>> more. At that level accounting protections would be a necessity, and
>>> I think the IRS would begin to take an interest as well.
>>
>> Well as a counter point, Plutohome paid I believe $1000US for the  
>> telnet
>> frontend interface, which I imagine was harder to code that what this
>> entails. I can't speak to the accounting/IRS implications. Heck,  
>> there
>> is an old patch that may be close enough to working that it might not
>> take much to tweak it for current SVN. I just don't personally  
>> have the
>> knowledge to do it myself.
>
> The telnet interface took about a week, IIRC.  I doubt Chris worked  
> on things
> anywhere near full-time, too.
>
>>> You might get a student to undertake the project as an "assignment",
>>> but you would be right back to the open source project that Myth
>>> already happily is. The "Summer of Code" was an example of this sort
>>> of thing, how well did that work out ?
>>
>> I don't know, actually.
>
> Half of them failed (and didn't get at least half of the payment) -  
> either
> didn't get much of anything done, or just didn't do any work.  A  
> few good
> results, the remaining were acceptable.
>
> And remember, those were all for $4500.
>
>>> The failure of such a project would reflect poorly on Isaac, even
>>> though he has expressed his negative opinion, some people would
>>> associate him with it no matter what he says, and the result  
>>> would be
>>> negative publicity for the entire project should somebody fail to  
>>> pay
>>> up.
>>
>> I don't think he's against bounties per se, just the collection  
>> method.
>> I'll let him speak to that.
>
> It's mostly the collection method, but also the fact that if I'm  
> going to be
> getting paid for something, I want to be getting paid something  
> reasonable.
>
> If you helped a friend move to a new place, would you rather:
> - Get paid $5.
> - Get nothing more than maybe a beer at the end of the day.
>
> That's pretty much analogous to how most bounties feel to me.

Agreed. Unless they are in the industry most folks have absolutely no  
idea what programming services are worth on the market, and would  
probably be astounded if they knew.

The cost to hire even one decent coder and pay salary, benefits,  
admin overhead, payroll taxes and everything else that goes along  
with it is much higher than most folks realize.

Before I retired from engineering my hourly rate worked out to over  
$50/hour, and the true cost to the employer was probably closer to  
$80 with everything figured in.

I would have laughed at somebody offering me $1000 for a week's full- 
time work, the free time would have been worth a lot more to me.

Even contract services from an offshore outfit are much higher than  
any bounty I have seen talked about.

People working on open-source projects are not normally motivated by  
money anyway, they are a different kind of animal, a better sort IMHO.

OTOH offering to pay a semester's tuition at a good CS school might  
attract some interest :-)