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the post you are now reading is designed to dull your senses to THE TRUTH.  do not live the life of the worker bee, the cog, the well-oiled piston in the MACHINE OF DECEIT!

there is a grand CONSPIRACY afoot.  you have been taught to believe that you are UNIQUE, one of a kind. THIS IS NOT TRUE. long ago, a cabal of scientists created technologies to ensure that ANYONE’S MIND AND BODY can be duplicated.

human cloning isn’t NEAR. it’s already HERE. discover the truth at http://JCHutchins.net

you are being DECEIVED. break free from the cogs, flee the hive, become A PROPHET OF THE TRUTH!

kilroy2. was here … kilroy2.0 is everywhere

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So just wanted to point out I am good, I am alive.  Hopefully soon I will be able to get back soon but things are busy but good.

I had another one of those ideas.  y'know… the one's that keep getting me into trouble?

Anyway, I was listening to TLLTS today…Episode 290…
the one with that dentist who is creating the OpenMolar project and I was thinking that here is this large group of professionals who are now trained by the proprietary software companies to pay money through the nose on a regular basis. They're used to it…they don't mind paying if the software is actually worth it's salt. But this sort of niche software is often not worth it's salt. Often they're locked into proprietary systems and their client data is held ransom.

Why don't people like that have bounties?

Why isn't there an organization to coordinate software bounties for niche markets like that?

The organization would have to be an impartial third party to hold the funds until the bounty is met, or until a preset amount of time expires and it reverts to the party who posted the bounty. And the organization would also have to handle disputes over whether the terms of the bounty are met or not, and if so, eventual transferral of the funds.

If this system got big enough, the organization could support itself from the interest of the bounty money sitting in the bank.

It would act as intermediary between the niche markets and the developers, making it so that there is a monetary impetus to fulfill these niche needs.

Of course this system wouldn't be worth a damn unless it was widely used, but it could be a sustainable system if it got widespread usage.

If this was done by an already respected organization like the Linux Foundation, it would get widespread pretty quick because of the great reputation of the Linux Foundation. Of course all bounties set up would stipulate that the source code was open and would therefore benefit everyone by greatly increasing the free software libraries of the world. Bounties could be set for anything that the bounty poster desired, be it bugfixes or completely new software. And whether or not it was done would depend on how attractive the bounty is.

It would need to be set up so that people could add to existing bounties. There doesn't need to be five thousand different bounties for the same thing. If two ideas are similar, they could be grouped, or someone could just add money to someone else's pre-existing bounty. For instance… "Say, I too would benefit from a new orthopedic X-Ray database system… I'll just put another $500 on that bounty!" or "Say, if someone were to fill that bounty it would nearly fill my needs, but if they were to add this one extra feature as a plugin, then it'd actually be perfect for my needs, so I'll throw $100 on that bounty with this feature stipulation!"

From the developer point of view… "Gee, this software project has $5000 in bounties from different posters… if I tackle the main one, I'll get about $3500 of it, and then I can make some of the rest of that money working on plugins… so long as nobody beats me to it!" or "Oh crap, someone already beat me to the main course, but I think I can make some money fleshing out the requested plugins"

Developers wishing to work on projects would sign on to the project to let the bounty poster know it was being worked on and ask for more information about what the software is supposed to accomplish.

This idea can be fleshed out a lot more in detail, but I think there is enough here for people to start talking about it. Canonical did bounties for a while, and they were a neat idea, but they weren't known about widely enough, and there was only one entity posting the bounties. In the case of the dentist on TLLTS, he paid thousands of dollars yearly for software that did not fulfill his needs. And he's one dentist. Most towns have at least one, usually more than one dentist. That is millions of dollars in just one niche market. Think about it.

Update

CyberCod forgot to mention there should be a minimum bid, just to stop people making stupid requests for a couple of cents.  Say 25 bucks for an enhancement, a hundred for a new system or whatever.

/Update

Anyway I think it's a great idea so go vote it up if you like it too!