Business and Drupal
Participants
- Boris Mann (organizer)
- Gerhard Killesreiter
- Károly Négyesi
- Robert Douglass
- Marc Canter
- Norm Roulet
- Peter Holmes
- Gábor Hojtsy
- Robert Castelo
- Alan Evans
Please contact Boris to have your name added to the list of participants. Unlike some other cells, participation will not be restricted, although we would like to have serious progress on the issues stated below.
Incenting development: bounties
Several other projects have a version of "bounties" — money donated to fund development of specific features and/or bug fixes. Should/can Drupal adopt a similar system?
Links of interest
- (scroll down to bottom of page)Nat Friedman: General Bounty System (Jan. 2005)
- Gnome Bounties
- Struts Bug Bounty (Oct. 2002)
- Mozilla Bug Bounty Announcement (Aug. 2004)
Funding Drupal
As well as external, "business" interest in Drupal, what can us business-type people do to help fund/market/develop Drupal as a community?
Sponsored and proprietary modules
Everything from the typical open source responsibilities discussion to the ins and outs of receiving recognition for sponsored modules.
One good example here is (one of) the *Nukes. There was a requirement to include a copyright notice and link back to the community. Would it be appropriate for a sponsored module to include such a hard-coded link somewhere? What are the pros and cons of this? In what other ways could module sponsors be recognized and promoted?
What is the progress on this?
There are several features I'd like to put a bounty on. If there has been no progress since this page was posted and no answers to the questions then I have a few suggestions to offer.
We can somehow incorporate it into the projects module. Or we can create a bounty node. People that need a job done can create a bounty node post. They would enter the name, feature, description, category, bounty, etc. Once that is done it will be on drupals site.
Then make a bounty filtered category search page for bounties and/or a show all page for bounties.
Once a bounty is posted a bounty hunter can take the job by posting a comment. Or if it's really advanced we could use something like the project module offers and assign it to a bounty hunter.
We can also setup a terms of agreement page. The content being something similar to this:
- Standard Terms:
----------------------------------------------------
- Exclusive contract/bounty - first to post comment and approved by poster
- Two week timeline
- Payment on completion
- 0 fatal bugs (bug that prevents objective)
- no more than 2 regular bugs (bug that does not prevent objective)
- no more than 1 behavioral changes
- Finish Line Terms (whatever)
----------------------------------------------------
- Non exclusive bounty
- First to finish working gets paid
- 0 fatal bugs (bug that prevents objective)
- no more than 2 regular bugs (bug that does not prevent objective)
- no more than 1 behavioral changes
Other terms agreement types...
----------------------------------------------------
I'm not concerned with this now but eventually we could have a system to rate the participant work. For now, if we need to, we could just use post comments.
But let's get this up there soon. I have bounties to post!!!
Lots of great comments. The
Lots of great comments. The page here is about the discussion that will take place at the Drupal convention in Belgium (Feb. 25th).
It will be a long time before bounties are integrated directly into Drupal.org. In fact, I would say that it makes more sense to happen through some sort of external service.
I've written up an initial module open for bounty-style development (securesite.module), but haven't posted/publicized it yet. The system that is running on is actually Drupal-based, but is just starting out. I'm willing to give it a try.
I won't be able to attend
I won't be able to attend but I want you to tell everyone how vital it is to get this up. However improbable I would like to see this in drupal asap.
Open source has many pros but it also has a few agonizing cons. This is just my opinion and I'm not sure if I can put into words correctly but the major issue with open source development like drupal is that you have no origin of responsibility. If I have a problem and no one cares to fix it I'm screwed. If I make a fuss about it they shift responsibility to me with this phrase, "this is open source software. if you don't like it fix it yourself". Ok, so if I need to take care of it myself I need then I can:
A. Goto school for 4 years and get my CS degree. Then for 2 months learn the inner works of drupal, php, mysql, cvs, diff, patch, phptemplates and html. Typical cms users come from a mix of know nothing to all of these.
OR
B. Pay someone to do it for me. I don't know the inner workings of drupal or php and I don't want to know. I already have a full time job.
There are hundreds of people like me who need things but are incapable of doing them. This framework *needs* to be in place.
Consider that hosting companies are switching over to PHP5 and drupal is not php5 compatible. Thousands of drupal sites are going to break instantly unless this gets done. Think if something was setup for people to donate to the "PHP5 compatibility project" 8 months ago when this was first mentioned. Drupal would be twice as far along with plenty of areas blooming into maturity. And a lot less demand and pressure would be taken off the core developers. It would get a lot more response than a donate button in the corner.
Just to be clear, the
Just to be clear, the existence or not of bounties doesn't prevent you from hiring a developer to change or fix things on your behalf. The costs are generally much lower, and you are always welcome to organize your own "bounties" for features that interest you.