Development Bounties

[SomeGuy99]

Saw this a few days ago, seemed relevant.

Thank you so much for the link. Amazing stuff!

+1

Very interesting. I think it can be summed up as 'people have more fun working on personal projects, and work harder'.

That's kind of common sense though.

Get Hooka to work on some stuff; He mentioned he was in need of cash.

 

[juniorm33]

I know. I understand the careful balance, that's why I'd like the rewards to be for smaller tasks. Those ones which people say are 'easy' but they just get overlooked for weeks. Little fixes, little solutions.

Those little things can make a big difference.

But if we say, hey, here is $250 to (for example) tidy up the Amiga emulator - to be paid when it's done, we might get a nice gradual series of small fixes done on various bits of software - there is a level we can reach quickly where the Pandora does most things most people want very very well, I want us to push towards that asap using whatever processes/incentives we can.

These things seem to already be happening, and at a very fast rate.
I really don't see how the money would make any difference in the example you gave.

 

[Exophase]

now that i think about it
SGStair got wifi working on the ds thanks to a bountie as motivation (note he did reverse engineer it)

akkit.org if i remmber

I know sgstair, and he's a man that loves DS and loves to reverse engineer. Chances are he would have done it regardless of the bounty and was merely happy to accept it.

 

[bzar]

I think in many cases community reverence and attribution can be enough. Put up some "accomplishments" and forum badges available for people contributing their talent. You can have a Wiki Warrior badge and an OS guru trophy and a Popular App Developer prize. Also joining Theme Artist and Emulator Wizard. Have these scale for a variety of skill levels (eg. for porting stuff: basic straight port, pandora-customized port, pandora-specialized port) and you might find motivated people doing stuff.

Money should come into play when no one will probably not do what is needed or when it needs to be done fast. In this I second Craig's point. The faster we get the basic stuff ironed out the better.

 

[GizmoTheGreen]

now that i think about it
SGStair got wifi working on the ds thanks to a bountie as motivation (note he did reverse engineer it)

akkit.org if i remmber

I know sgstair, and he's a man that loves DS and loves to reverse engineer. Chances are he would have done it regardless of the bounty and was merely happy to accept it.

I guess, still though

 

[God Ginrai]

1) SDK for what language? If you are just looking for a language that works, Python is already working quite well, from what I've seen. Your SDK already exists, just write! It does Java (I'm pretty sure), so that's covered. It's only a matter of time until someone figures out .Net support. Or you want a C++ SDK. Well in that case ...

I'd like to know where people keep falling under the assumption that the Pandora has Java support from. Because if it is right, I would like to know that, and if it is wrong, I'd like people to stop thinking that. -_-

-God Ginrai

 

[Exophase]

The only cases where I personally believe bounties have really made a difference are where it was a very highly in demand task that generated a lot of money for something that wasn't that earth shatteringly difficult. Like getting N64 emulators ported to XBox, which generated something like $2000 several years ago.

In order for something like that to happen to begin with you've got to have a community with a very high users to skilled developers ratio, or at least one where most of the skilled developers are already selling what they do like on iPhone, Symbian, or Windows Mobile. Nothing like this community, where there aren't that many users and there are a ton of skilled developers.

Bounties in the past, say for GP2X, haven't generated any decent cash because people don't really have confidence that it'll go anywhere (and rightfully so). But this doesn't mean this community isn't willing to put up cash - quite the opposite, for evidence see how much zodttd has received (and I have gotten a portion of) from "donate to beta test" money, even in this community (as opposed to iPhone's where the volume is just huge). Looking at this from the opposite end, that is, using developed programs to entice money instead of using money to entice program development, things look very different. Let's say, for example, Ari64 and Adventus got together and did the Mupen64plus ARM recompiler and 3D acceleration together, but then decided to hold it hostage for $10,000 before releasing it, while getting someone very trustworthy (say, ED) to demo it and vouch for it. They'd get a lot of bile for this, but they'd probably also raise the money, with dozens of people showing up to pay tens or even hundreds of dollars.

Actually that sounds like a fun idea, I should have tried it on PSP ;p If you can make 100,000 newbs pay $1 each you'd be sitting pretty well. I doubt you'd be able to though.

 

[sepp256]

I know. I understand the careful balance, that's why I'd like the rewards to be for smaller tasks. Those ones which people say are 'easy' but they just get overlooked for weeks. Little fixes, little solutions.

Those little things can make a big difference.

We know from the wifi fiasco and Christian being paid money and DOING NOTHING for it was a disaster. (Yeah Christian, I'm sure you will threaten the mods again to have your name removed, why didn't you put that sort of effort in to working for us - or just give us our money back?).

But if we say, hey, here is $250 to (for example) tidy up the Amiga emulator - to be paid when it's done, we might get a nice gradual series of small fixes done on various bits of software - there is a level we can reach quickly where the Pandora does most things most people want very very well, I want us to push towards that asap using whatever processes/incentives we can.

"overlooked for weeks"? Craigix, considering that only a few hundred Pandoras have been delivered, emulator development is happening very quickly and will continue to accelerate as batch 1 ships. You should let monetary bounties on emulators wait until development slows or until it's apparent that something important is not getting done. You are just going to frustrate/demotivate people who are planning to/already working on parts emulators for free. I also don't think that people who contributed to a developer fund wanted to see their money squandered away. Rather, they wanted to see it used to sustain development over time.

If you want to spend some money now, then you should put it toward something really useful/challenging... like proper suspend functionality or hardware video decoding on the DSP or something.

It would be much better to organize TODO lists for various projects first and see which ones the community cares about most or don't get done. Also, dev fund money doesn't have to be spent on specific tasks, it could be used as prize money in competitions. The dev fund management should be much more open and run by the community. Please don't just slap our money on random tasks that are obviously going to be done, anyway. Have some patience on the community.

 

[SomeGuy99]

Aren't you guys missing the obvious? This is about selling batch 2 and beyond. It's about having a compelling product to offer people, including software.

Craig is suggesting we fast-forward the development to raise the profile of the Pandora. You know, hit the ground running.

Just business-think really.

I'm wondering if we'll end up with a paid development team augmented with volunteers. I worked for a company that did that, and it seemed to work.

What people want = sales = success

 

[centus]

Here's a thought, why not ask the current devs what they think should be a paid-for task?
They would know what's annoying to do, they would also be able to say that they CAN do it if correctly motivated.
In addition, they would be able to tell you what isn't worth a bounty as they are already working on it/planning to be working on it soon.

I think it makes the most sense as we DO have a bunch of guys working pretty consistently on making the OS and emulators better, I'm sure there are more than a few tasks they would be able to do but don't want to even start as it would be a long/annoying task to do.

Just a thought...

 

[ari64]

Let's say, for example, Ari64 and Adventus got together and did the Mupen64plus ARM recompiler and 3D acceleration together, but then decided to hold it hostage for $10,000 before releasing it, while getting someone very trustworthy (say, ED) to demo it and vouch for it. They'd get a lot of bile for this, but they'd probably also raise the money, with dozens of people showing up to pay tens or even hundreds of dollars.

Well, the problem with this example is that it took me a few months to rewrite the dynamic recompiler, but I spent the next year fixing and debugging it. So I'm not sure what bounties for something like that will get you, probably something that just barely works well enough to collect the bounty.

 

[MonkeyChops]

Why not just make a list of everything that everyone wants done (within reason) and make it so everyone can donate to the bounty of their preferred project. This would make what everyone wants pretty obvious and make the potential bounty much higher. OP can get the ball rolling with the dev fund money towards what they feel is the most important and add to it as they feel.

One problem I see with this bounty idea is that you could possibly have multiple people working on the same thing at the same time and not know that other people have already done the work they are doing when they should (if possible) be working together on it. Perhaps a sign-up option for the bounty would be a good idea, one where it posted the bounty hunters who have signed up and a way to communicate with them, then people could communicate with others already working on the project and collaborate if possible. Of course then there's the problem of who gets the money...

Another problem is at what point do people get the money? Would a quick sub-par job be worthy? Would there have to be a testing period to see if the work is worthy? How would one decide if the work was good enough? Perhaps said work is the best possible for the pandora but doesn't meet 100% of the expectations of the community, what then?

This could get ugly....

 

[TrashyMG]

^^ Add a Bounty board where people could apply to do projects.. with a counsel of a few elite Pandora People that votes who gets what project?

 

[SomeGuy99]

^^ Add a Bounty board where people could apply to do projects.. with a counsel of a few elite Pandora People that votes who gets what project?

But who votes for the elite council?

Beurocracy and politics are funny. :lol:

 

[craigix]

We already have the development fund, the question is, who gets it and for what?

 

[MonkeyChops]

I don't think anyone needs to vote on who gets what, devs will decide for themselves if they want to take on a bounty. But having a bounty board that general public can donate to their favorite project is a good idea IMO. OP can decide what is really important to do simply by adding dev fund money towards it.

I meant it would be good if the bounty hunters that were going after a bounty were listed so other devs could communicate and collaborate toward a common goal and then I guess split the bounty 50/50 or 33/33/33 or whatever. I'm in no way shape or form a dev so perhaps working together with other devs is more or less a non-issue, I don't know, just throwing it out there. It seems to me that things would get done faster and more efficient if devs worked together but I could be completely wrong.

[edit] btw, my vote is for flash support and multi-player over wifi support in the common emus

 

[LeChuck87]

We already have the development fund, the question is, who gets it and for what?

maybe a flattr-like solution integrated in the apps-store

 

[WizardStan]

I'd like to know where people keep falling under the assumption that the Pandora has Java support from. Because if it is right, I would like to know that, and if it is wrong, I'd like people to stop thinking that. -_-

If it doesn't have support, it should. JamVM is in the Angstrom repository, runs quite well on my BeagleBoard for many things that I've tested, and is by no means huge (10MB for the entire thing)
Even if it's not installed on the NAND, someone could easily build it into a PND capable of running JAR files. I'm still waiting on my Pandora so I can't test such a thing

 

[God Ginrai]

We already have the development fund, the question is, who gets it and for what?

maybe a flattr-like solution integrated in the apps-store

That's pretty interesting. o.o

I'd like to know where people keep falling under the assumption that the Pandora has Java support from. Because if it is right, I would like to know that, and if it is wrong, I'd like people to stop thinking that. -_-

If it doesn't have support, it should. JamVM is in the Angstrom repository, runs quite well on my BeagleBoard for many things that I've tested, and is by no means huge (10MB for the entire thing)
Even if it's not installed on the NAND, someone could easily build it into a PND capable of running JAR files. I'm still waiting on my Pandora so I can't test such a thing

That may be true, but just because something is in the Angstrom repository and works well does not mean we should just assume the Pandora has it. Although, if it works as well as you say, then I do agree that it should be in the NAND, or at least have a PND.

-God Ginrai

 

[chaosmage]

Hardware accelerated video (I watch downloaded youtube videos on my n810 all the time)

Hardware acceleration of the pygame rendering stuff (if possible? not sure if this is already done) - This will directly affect the quality of the games I make for the system, so I have a serious vested interest in this.

Yabause! I don't care if it's slow, if it can run the 2D games reasonably I'd play it all the time: Warcraft, Guardian Heroes, the various Capcom 2D fighters, Legend of Oasis, Saturn Bomberman, etc.