Krzysztof-
Open-source is 20 years old. There are thousands of
open-source
projects. Some are successful, most are not. The development of
open-source projects is on public record. There are mailing list
archives, project web sites, history of CVS commits.
We don't have to guess or invent new ways of
making open-source
projects succesful.
Yes, we should just all keep doing whatever we have been doing for 20
years and be happy, and never try anything new. By the way, this whole
Wikipedia idea is kind of crazy. People should just use CVS to edit the
encyclopedia, why come up with something new when there is a perfectly
good process in place already? Jesus Fucking Christ, what kind of crap
attitude is this? "We don't have to guess or invent new ways"? No, we
don't, but guessing and experimenting is the source of all innovation.
Much safer strategy is to analyze past, which is
rich with examples,
Which you aren't even familiar with to the extent that you could name
them. I can: CoSource, SourceExchange, the Free Software Bazaar. All these
models have been examined and have failed for different reasons. CoSource
failed for lack of VC, but had quite a lot of successful bounties
completed at the time it closed down (check
archive.org). SourceExchange
was targeted at corporations, not individuals. The Free Software Bazaar
was a static HTML website maintained by Axel Boldt, who lost interest at
some point, but it was reasonably active and led to some completed
projects.
The open code market idea is certainly not new, and it is one which is
increasingly being explored, refined and adopted, and which will
eventually inject the one thing into the open source process which is
currently missing from it: money. I advise you to at least do some basic
research and read, for example, Jordi Carrasco-Muñoz' paper "The Open-Code
Market":
http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_11/munoz/index.html
As well as "A history of markets for open source software":
http://www.ms.lt/en/workingopenly/markets.html
I've never seen "rewarding with points"
system applied in practice.
Therefore it's unlikely that it's a good idea
"I've never seen a wiki applied in practice for building an encyclopedia.
Therefore it's unlikely that it's a good idea." Look, please familiarize
yourself with basic logic before you make bullshit arguments like that.
and it's certainly very
risky to try things no-one has tried before.
The risk in minimal. If it alienates people, we scrap the system and don't
do it again.
I don't know a single succesful open-source
project that implements
bounty system.
Your ignorance is unfortunate.
I've seen projects that flourish despite not
having any external
rewards systems in place (mono is a recent example, but there are of
course plenty of them: GNOME and KDE projects, subversion, eclipse,
gcc and I would consider wikimedia to be quite successful so far as it
works well enough to support a massive undertaking as WikiPedia).
GNOME has a bounty system, and it works:
http://www.gnome.org/bounties/
http://www.gnome.org/bounties/Winners.html
Mozilla has recently started bounties as well:
http://www.markshuttleworth.com/bounty.html
It's safe to conclude that you don't need
bounty system to have
succesful project.
Well, you can set up whatever straw man you want and shoot it down, but
that has never been the point of the proposal. Read it.
Erik