I would suspect that CanYa is behind this change. They I believe acquired BountySource two years ago, and probably just enough of the old guard has left for them to push this change through internally.
Not sure what the motive would be though.
Not sure what the motive would be though.
A non-evil motive would be that for accounting reasons that has to be kept on the books as a liability, and it's not nice to keep liabilities around indefinitely. There are lots of situations where this is the case, but where "just keep the money" is actually accepted practice. Gift cards, for instance. Also, I've seen IT support contracts where you purchase a certain number of "hours" that you spend on logged work; and those hours expire if you don't use them within 2 years.
But obviously this is completely different, since in the above two cases, you as the consumer have control over when the spend happens; you have no way of knowing if or when anyone is going to fulfill your bounty.
I have to imagine the amount of money they're looking at collecting here in the >2 year old bucket is large enough that they're willing to take the PR hit. There's probably a good chunk of change there held by now-inactive users who they're hoping won't actually do anything about the change like redirecting their funds.
It's also really sad because the open source project I contribute to is six years old, and had a couple year quiet period, but is often tackling multi-year old issues now. In our case, we don't use BountySource, but had we, we'd be looking at losing funding that we were still very much intending to earn.
Or it could be exactly the opposite bucket: any bounties less than 2 years old are still subject to expiration, but they're not allowing you to redirect them when they expire.
I would imagine that it is the money.