[mythtv-users] Bounty request to enable ITV HD in Trunk .22

[Daniel Kristjansson]

On Thu, 2009-06-18 at 08:38 -0700, Robert McNamara wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 8:11 AM, Brian Wood <beww at beww.org> wrote:
>         Just a personal opinion, but I suspect the "bounty" approach
>         won't work too
>         well with Myth.
> 
> Oh I don't know, it worked to get both multirec and the telnet
> interface into myth.  :)

Both of those efforts had corporate backing. I don't think there
was any bounty involved in the telnet interface, but there was
with multirec. With multirec, Open Source Partners started the
ball rolling with a small donation and ended up topping off the
end user donations with a large contribution of their own.
I don't know if that is a good example since OSP hasn't followed
their first experiment in MythTV bounties with any additional
bounties.*

There are several problems with bounties. The first one is that
non-programmers tend to _vastly_ under-estimate the cost of software
development. So you end up with a $500 bounty for a $20,000 project
and angry users who don't understand why no-one tries to collect that
bounty. And the second is simply that the bounties are raised in an
ad-hock manner and via pledges. What you need is someone trustworthy
holding real funds and a developer who has pledged to do the work
once the goal is reached. Third, money paid for one component can
actually be detrimental to getting other parts completed. Both in
terms of sucking devs away from those other parts to work on sponsored
projects, and in demotivating devs working on the project as a hobby
who see some other dev getting paid to do what they do for free.

-- Daniel

* Note: With OSP I came up with a very easy to implement design for
  multirec and one focused solely on DVB recorders so that the bounty
  would be as low as possible, and a few of us worked on the project
  at well below market rates. Yet the bounty was met only after the
  corporate backing kicked in.