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.