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Need a Good FOSS App Coded Fast? Offer Up a Bounty

Can commercial software companies and open source foundations successfully advance their software efforts by offering bounties to outside developers? Although Stormy Peters, executive director of the GNOME Foundation, says "the GNOME community has had mixed results with bounties and grants," she has an interesting interview up on the topic with Stefano Maffulli,  community manager of mobile open source company Funambol. The interview apparently resulted from Maffuli approaching her about a GNOME-related grant. Maffuli describes bounties and grants as fertile incentives for solid open source software development, and cites a number of specific success stories.

Funambol has seen strong growth in its open source-focused mobile technology business recently, and Maffuli points specifically to the Funambol Code Sniper program as evidence of how bounties can usher in important software development that wouldn't otherwise take place. To see how that program works, take a look at the right side of this page. It contains a list of many bounties offered by Funambol for development of plug-ins and other types of software to work with its mobile platform. Many of them are bounties offered for client software applications that can extend Funambol's reach and compatibility, as seen in the screenshot below:

 

As you can see, the bounties aren't high, but there are lots of them. Maffuli had this to say about Code Sniper in his interview with Peters:

"Being a commercial open source project, Funambol needs to respond to customer requests first and at the end of the day there is little time for exploration. Therefore, sometimes it is more convenient to empower teams that are not part of the company to explore environments that are not necessarily going to generate revenue."

He also cites these specific examples of Code Sniper success stories:

"For example, under the Code Sniper program, we sponsored a solution to sync contacts with Yahoo! and Google services long before we had any customers ask for it. Now that code is part of the Funambol commercial offering (and we've hired the developers, too). Another example of this R&D play is the exploration of social networking features that resulted into the development of AvatarGrabber: it's a simple java app that 'scrapes' the web in search of images of people in your addressbook and lets you chose which image to assign to them."

Maffuli notes that many of the developers who seek the Code Sniper bounties are young people who want to learn how to develop for mobile environments. He also notes, though, that Funambol has hired some of them. Now there's a way to get your foot in the door of a successful young open source company. There are a lot of other good points made in the interview. Check it out.

• GNOME
• development
• bounties
• Funambol
• Grants

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