What if the user who made the bounty suddenly changes his mind and decides not to reward someone who solved it and made a commit? how would you guys go on making sure that nobody does this, just curious seems like a cool idea though.
I hope this answers your question, thank you so much for your feedback! happy to follow-up here
What I'm trying to say is: The line could be blurry. The PR code quality could be crap and the project really needs to invest a lot of time to make this fit for merge, in which case they rightfully refuse the bounty. But it could be that the code quality is great and they are just trying to misuse this to make people do more than they originally wanted. And the difference between those scenarios could be hard to see for somebody external. Or even for the parties involved: The project could legitimately think that the code is not of sufficient quality while the submitter could legitimately think that they satisfied the request.
Who is the arbitter? Will people tend to accept the PR anyway (silently clean up and spend time afterwords), not wanting to risk their reputation? Or will submitters tend to accept major changes, possibly beyond the original ask, not wanting to risk their reputation? Seems a bit to me like a problem also faced by Airbnb and similar services.
you can look at Remotion's 17 completed bounties, where specs & acceptance criteria are always included: https://github.com/remotion-dev/remotion/issues?q=label%3A%2...
that being said, we have only had a handful of projects using OSS bounties so far so we haven't seen everything under the sun. I acknowledge what you mean by blurry lines and how/when they might occur. but as I said before, when specs/scope/acceptance-criteria are in place, it's really hard to go wrong
At these levels it's not such a concern about getting stuck with a bad job. You just don't use that developer again and the $200 didn't wipe out your company.
I've commissioned jobs like that on freelancer sites for a lot more and pretty much did the same thing. Paid someone else to rework it or reworked it myself. I wouldn't use them again, but I did still get enough of what I needed and the job got done.
I guess it goes the other way too. Let's say I'm uncommonly generous and most other consumers will be much more demanding and try to get away with whatever they can. So the same thing as a provider. You get burned by one buyer for $200, you just don't service them any more but otherwise don't worry about the chance too much.