Another thought on the bounty thing.
If there were problems with a number of people working on the same bounty and we have the problem with who finishes first and getting crappy results etc. we could implement it where people could sign up for the bounty. If a single bounty has a number of people signing up for it, it could be broken up or they could work together or what not. (Haven' thought that through completely) Still just a thought I guess
That's an option, but it does devalue the "true value" of devcoins imho. It reduces the competitive spirit, which will increase the time to market overall. I think collaborative pools are a better solution for projects just too difficult by themselves (just like with mining bitcoins), and even being part of a pool doesn't guarantee winning a bounty. It's this risk of loss (not winning a bounty) which gets people working faster, because they're more motivated when they decide to go for it. Having runner-up bounties is another way around it - eg 12 for the first one or two, 6 for the next two, and so on, because then it's not a completely wasted effort for the fastest workers, and there is built-in redundancy - lots of different ways of solving the same problem, which is a boon for open source (the real winner here). I think we should definitely have a collaboration subforum or something where people can find others to work on a bounty with them more easily. A website collaboration connector thing would be great too, where people list their skills and can search for others with skills they need, and I imagine that would make for a good bounty in the future. Bounties should be about seeding ideas that we want the open source community to grow.
Sanctioned bounties are also a way around it - actually giving work to specific people, but that opens the door for abuse (just like banks bribing politicians to make people need banks more)...while there are benefits, the potential abuse is a big turn off. For massive projects (like blender.org), which are managed it's a bit different, and those would get maintenance pay rather than bounties - I believe this was the original intention of devcoins.
The other thing about signing up for bounties is that it can be intimidating for someone who may actually have provided the fastest/simplest implementation, but never tried, which can be avoided by it being blind.
If you're worried that at some point there will be 10 awesome developers always getting all the bounties and others work on them but never get the chance, I understand the worry (being a relatively crappy programmer), but at the very least, open source will win. The other crappy programmers and I can study what they did, while its still fresh, learn from them, and even apply it to our own projects. That's the great thing about open source. The other thing is that there will always be tons more bounties than there is the manpower to do. The demand for software (all software) is essentially infinite, so I can't imagine a time when someone can't find something to do. Heck, I could probably list 5 improvement bounties off the top of my head for the last 2-3 that I did...and the best thing with open source is that I don't have to be the one to do it. If someone looked at my code and improved it so I could use it on my website, we could even have a deal where they give me a portion in collaboration instead of going through the hassle of creating a page/domain/server specifically for it, etc, and still get the lions share of the bounty.
It doesn't have to work the way that I'm describing here; I just believe that if it does, devcoins and
http://devtome.com in particular will become much more valuable much more quickly. It's a more capitalist way of doing things. Crappy results should be filtered out by the administrators, and if someone wins a bounty but has crappy code/skills, it's probably because the criteria for it weren't specific or clear enough. If the administrators are satisfied with the results matching the criteria, then the bounties are complete - keep in mind all bounties are open for a few days after claiming, and objections are encouraged/noted. After the fact, it's just wasting time.
Of course, all of this is only applicable if you consider devcoins from the perspective of a bitcoin competitive mining analogy, which I don't believe was the original intention. I'm still waiting to hear the original devcoiner's thoughts on this, on whether that has changed. Even if it wasn't the original intention, I believe this perspective still fits the devcoin motto perfectly: "From the many, one. From one, the source".
