This could be really neat. From Surfin’ Safari:
Karelia Software is working on an exciting new app that uses WebKit: Sandvox. This web authoring tool is shaping up to be rather spiffy and elegant. But they need your help. There’s a couple of bugs in WebKit which are impeding their progress and that they’d really like fixed soon. So they are generously offering bounties for fixes.
Except look at how much money they are offering. $250! They are asking expert developers to put their overhead, expertise, and time into solving another company’s problems. I can’t imagine that these bugs that Apple has not been able to fix yet will take any less than 10 hours for someone to fix. At a modest $100 an hour, they should be offering $1000 minumum per commited bug.
It’s a bounty, not contract work. I glanced at some of the bugs and I think some of them could be knocked out in at most 4 hours by someone who is an expert on WebKit internals. And for someone who is not an expert, you can learn about the internals of a major open source project and contribute to the community while scoring some pocket money, a la the Google summer of code.
I think it’s really cool what the Karelia guys are doing.
First of all I would like to mention that I do actually think it’s really cool that they are doing this, if only because it’s so rare. BUT
[1] It just doesn’t seem that, for someone who is capable of fixing these types of bugs, it would be worth their time.
[2] Perhaps more importantly, would it really be that hard for Karelia to up the bounty? It’s a short list of bugs, and they are only paying for confirmed fixes.
But overall, I think it’s a great idea. I don’t think Karelia is doing anything slimey, but it just comes off as a little weak. “Spend hours and hours solving this obscure bug that paid apple engineers haven’t gotten around to fixing, in order to help our comercial product, and we will pay you what you billed for 2 hours of setting up a wireless network when you were 20″.
But then again, how long have I spent on this blog post… okay back to work…
It makes perfect sense to me.
People get involved with open source for a variety of reasons. Some want the noteriety, some want the resume points, some want the tool to work better. Still others have a problem with the tool, like Karelia does, and want to fix that one problem. That is why I submitted my one patch to the ANT build system – a bug was getting in my way.
If someone wants to improve webkit for their own reasons, but they do not have a specific bug to fix, then they might want to fix one of Karelia’s bugs. The money will not cover the effort, but they would not have gotten paid for their efforts anyway. Getting a bit of cash seems better than no cash, and if one of your goals is a job offer from a mac software company, fixing webkit bugs might just get that. It is always good to be known as someone who can fix problems.
Karelia made it clear that they are not in the business of fixing webkit bugs. I suspect that they picked the numbers as about what it would cost them to code up a cheesy, but usable, workaround. A for-real fix is better, as then the problem is solved forever, but a for-real fix would cost more. If the bounty entices someone to fix the problem, then they do not need to spend time on a cheesy fix.
Scott
see name.
fixed the spelling, thanks