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Comment by isaaclyman | Hacker News Reader

Devil's advocate: How about an issue/PR tracker that lets users pay for priority? A simple bidding system. If BigCorp International is willing to pay $200/hour for IE10 support, they can be next on your list. And afterward, an bug with significant community support totalling $50/hour, pledged by 50 different users. With allowances for your own preferences as maintainer and the needs of the community, of course, but giving people who care the most the opportunity to put their money where their pain is.

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Someone did that, back in 2003! It looks like its changed over time (and its security certificate is recently expired).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bountysource

Bountysource is definitely still active, though not as utilised as it should be. The cert expiring is obviously dodgy but it's only expired by a few hours and assumedly will be fixed soon

I built a site like this a few years ago, got absolutely no traction, and shut it down.

I'm very open to the possibility that I went about it the wrong way, but I don't really know what I should have done differently. Maybe it could have worked if I had done a lot more evangelizing -- I admittedly didn't do much, but what I did do was so poorly received that I gave up.

I think something like this has to be integrated directly into github or the project's issue tracker to have a chance to gain any traction. But honestly, even then, I'm not sure it would work.

Something like this could work, but I worry that it would create competitiveness and animosity among users.

This is the point of having a seperate buisness license. Sell to big companies along with support.

I think the point was to have a one time option limited to the scope of work instead of yet another subscription model that tries to pay for the work as a form of insurance.

vim has something like this: users who pay can vote on features to be added. https://vim.sourceforge.io/sponsor/faq.php

However, the donation is about helping poor children in Uganda, not about running the project.

Paying for PR? really? Why would anyone do that rather than maintain their own copy if it is an OSS project?

Maintaining your own fork means you are taking de-facto responsibility for the maintenance of more projects in addition to your paying projects.

The costs of keeping them current adds up surprisingly quickly.

In fact, it adds up so quickly that my company has a standing policy in place that we will do _whatever_it_takes_ to have any pull requests we need in an upstream project integrated in order to avoid us having to maintain a fork.

What this means in practice usually is that getting the pull request accepted becomes the primary focus for one of the senior engineers for the 1-2 weeks it takes to get it into a shape that the project maintainer can work with.

As you can imagine this is also expensive, but it's a fraction of the cost of maintaining our own fork of the project.

So - here's my offer to Libré, Free and Open Source Software maintainers everywhere:

I will _gladly_ pay the cost of 1 week of a senior engineer's salary to have you accept my pull request if you are prepared to either:

1) do the quality control work yourself or…

2) hold the hand of one of my junior engineers while they learn how to do it.

> I will _gladly_ pay the cost of 1 week of a senior engineer's salary to have you accept my pull request if you are prepared to either: > 1) do the quality control work yourself

I too would gladly pay one dollar for a hundred dollars bill.

When you consider the cost of having to re-merge all your work on every update, I'd be more than happy to pay some reasonable sum to have it merged into master and maintained there. Could save me a lot of work.

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