Gun.io Debuts Free Group Funding for Open Source Projects | Hacker News Reader

Gun.io Debuts Free Group Funding for Open Source Projects

gun.io

51 pointsMizza21 comments

Offtopic, but there's something really off about Gun.io

Looking at their listings under Freelance / Open Source, the prices offered for those gigs are not even laughable, but an insult, even for developers from third-world countries.

So am I missing anything? Do I need to be logged-in or something?

Always happy to see projects coming out of my hometown. I like the idea, but I hope that there's good moderation for submitted bounties so it doesn't become another Rent-a-Coder like cess pool. It's also be neat if the bounties could be free form, so people could barter goods and services. Personally, being offered $50 is worse than not being offered money at all for something that I'd want to work on. On the other hand, for some tasks I wouldn't mind if someone were willing to trade me design work, or treat me to a lunch or a beer.

(I'm actually a Berkeley transplant, only moved here 3 weeks ago from Boston!)

The bartering goods and services idea is interesting, but it seems to only work for local things. The one thing I think would be interesting to use that for is for tutoring. I'd teach somebody Django if they could teach me Node, etc..

Hope you enjoy the bay, if you haven't already, I highly recommend grabbing a slice at cheeseboard.

In my experience, even mentoring works better in person.

I could see GitHub adding this in the future, e.g. instead of simply voting on/+1ing an issue, let people attach bounties. Is there proof, though, that this is something people want? It seems like Kickstarter has the "funding for big projects" thing nailed--I'm just wondering if there's really demand for "funding for small features"...

There are projects that Kickstarter does not accept.

Obviously, and my question is why? If they (or GitHub) could easily satisfy demand for this, why haven't they?

Github is famous for having employees only work on projects that interest them.

"Winner takes all" implies that many more people will lose out.

Don't get me wrong: I think that gun.io's approach is potentially a great way to get worthwhile stuff done on open source projects, but I'm also slightly sceptical that this might see a 99designs-style model infect people's mindshare more than it already does.

The Gun.io creator posted several bounties previously, which are still up. Including several which are fixed or have fixes in his GitHub pull requests (for LightWrite).

They haven't been closed so I assume the bounties haven't been paid. I get bad feelings about this.

Remedied! There was one pending claim which I was still testing. The other gigs have not had people actually submit claim requests for yet. I am a 'single founder' - lots of stuff to be done, that one didn't get sorted before you saw it.

The hang up is that the people who claimed them didn't realize that international payments aren't supported yet, unfortunately. (This is still is causing some communication problems. I wish I had a better payment solution. I have tried to make the language more clear.)

It took me a good 30 seconds after reading this comment to find this on your site. It's important info that really needs to be way more prominent than it is, like on the front page.

Hmmm. I'm retooling the copy on the frontpage anyway, I'll work that in somehow.

Thanks for the feedback!

This is awesome! My first startup was a kickstarter competitor (enjyn.com) and something like this is one of the big things I wanted to do for code!

My tentative plan was not to just make it for coders though, and to break things down, so one task is to write unit/accceptance tests for a portion of the bounty (maybe configurable, maybe 20 or 30%? dunno) and once the bounty for the tests was accepted, any code that passes those tests automatically gets the remainder of the bounty... if Gun.io can benefit from this idea, my blessings to you!

Thanks for your kind words!

I've thought a lot about the interesting ways to break projects down into things like that, I really like that test case idea. I'm also looking at integrating tightly with github, so that a commit could flag an action on Gun.io, there could be a post commit hook with .BOUNTY files, things like that. Really I'm just waiting to see how people use this iteration before I work on the next one, though.

Just out of curiosity - what did you learn from Enjyn? Would you consider it a success or a failure? What would you have done differently?

Sounds like you've got some good ideas, I figured you might :-) I dunno how I'd characterize Enjyn, probably a good experience but basically a failure. I think I allowed myself to be persuaded by my partners (against my instincts, but I probably wanted to agree with them) that kickstarter's ascendence didn't really change things for us that much and that we didn't need to completely rethink our plans and pivot before we'd launched. That's just one key point though, and I don't pretend it's the biggest or most significant mistake, just the earliest point when I think I knew in my gut things had changed and allowed myself to be talked out of it.

Is the point of this to fund project like kickstarter? Because I think what the FOSS community needs are much smaller, less marketable fixes and bounties. Like 'port django to python3' not 'write a new FOSS video editor'.

The first subheader of the linked article is "Kickstarter for Open Source?"

I'm glad something like this exists, but the ramp up time to learn each project seems way more effort than what it's worth for some of the bounties that are being posted.

Guess that's the perfect reason why it should exist: People who are already involved in existing projects could look out for low hanging fruits and that would be a win-win. The site could implement a project alert.

They should multiple payment methods, such as BitCoin.

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