Hi there, For those of you who find starring issues not satisfying enough, I've created a website that allows you to set a reward for whoever fixes your favorite bug: http://jobtorrent.org/
The problem that I'm trying to solve here is that some bugs are really 'popular' amongst users, but - for various reasons - not very 'popular' amongst developers. This often results in thousands of people starring an issue and - worse - repeating the issue over and over again on the mailing list. This is all very democratic, but wouldn't it be much easier if you could just say "I'll pay $10 to the first person who fixes this" and get on with life? Jobtorrent is pretty simple. Go to your favorite bug and copy the URL. Then go to http://jobtorrent.org/ and sign up as an 'employer'. Create a new 'job', set a price and paste the URL. A developer can then accept the job, submit a patch through the usual channels, and marks the job as done. If the employer is satisfied with the result, the developer gets paid. It's completely up to the employer to define 'satisfied': perhaps any patch will do, perhaps he/ she will not pay until the patch has actually been incorporated in Gears. In case you're wondering if I'm spamming every single list on Google Code, the answer is no. I am a Gears user myself and I've been waiting for full 64 bit support for ages. It's working more or less at this point, but I would gladly have paid someone to fix it sooner (if I had more money to spare). The converse is also true: I would love to help development of Gears, but at the moment I can only do it if somebody pays me for it. I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts about this, both from a practical point of view and an open-source-ethics point of view. Kind regards, Sjors
