Data Circle

Site tracks F/OSS coding bounties via Slashdot

The Participatory Culture Foundation has launched a site for listing free and open source software coding bounties. When I first looked at the site, I was surprised by how many bounties are available for completing certain open source tasks. The concept isn’t all that new – I first heard of it some time ago when the Mozilla Foundation offered cash rewards for finding security holes in the Firefox browser – but the sheer number of bounties available now is staggering. You might not be able to make a living from doing the work required to claim the rewards, but it’s a good incentive to get programmers to work on the parts of software that are often useful but seen as boring to implement. Let’s face it, fixing a memory leak in Firefox is never going to be as sexy as adding window transparency in X.org, but with a bit of financial compensation it might suddenly become the preferred project to work on.