OStatic

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.

Mike Gunderloy's post on FOSS Factory got me thinking about what Linux needs to gain mass market acceptance. After thinking about it, I've come up with a list of four things that the Linux community needs that aren't (as far as I know) yet in the works.

This isn't a list of impossible goals -- all of these things are attainable if the Linux industry and community were to decide that they are priorities. That's not to say that they'd be easy to accomplish, but the Linux community has proven good at working together when it's important.

It's long been a weakness of open source software development that only projects that interest developers get finished. While some view this as a proper democratic process, others point to the disproportionate number of programmer tools as compared to end-user applications, or complex projects that have languished because the work is too hard. New site FOSS Factory wants to tweak the process a little by making it easy to incent developers with cash bounties.