Idea: LSL Bounties?

I Am Not A Coder (tm).

I know a lot of people who aren't coders who have a very difficult time finding reliable or avalible scripters of can't afford the high comission rates.

Well what if we started a bounty system in SL similar to that allready being used for RL Open Source projects?

The general idea behind the bounty system is that a user posts the task they want done and the opening contribution to the bounty pool. Other users can contribute to the pool as long as the bounty is posted. The person or people who completes the task and delivers the finished product gets awarded the money in the pool. (A better description can be found at http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Software_bounty).

Thoughts? Good Idea? Bad Idea? Ideas on how to impliment it?

I think that would be a lot of fun. Really cool idea.

I love this idea! A forums setup for offering cash for code! And all of it becomes public! Man! I know people who would make serious use of this, and coders could make money by just picking a few jobs off the tree!

Not in a million years.

Open source is great for competing with companies like microsoft or huge platform plays, but when it starts competing with small business innovators .. it's not a service to anyone.

If you want to put bounties on code that LL might come along and co-opt .. I'd be all for that, because nobody in SL will do it.

But if it's something LL is not going to compete with and a resident might do it.. well, like I said, not in a million years!

Just want to point out: While bounties are most known among open source coders, I didn't say that in SL's case the system would only be for open-source code. Closed source projects are, in my mind, perfectly valid for this system.

The only way we'd know if it'd work is to try it once and make sure people know about it on multipul SL forum sites & ingame so it doesn't die prematurely. Never know till you try.

I think this is an excellent idea and would be interested in participating on both sides. I wonder how administration and oversight would go. How is the decision made that a scripter's solution is deemed effective / satisfactory? The person starting teh commission? A shareholder-like decision model?

I like this enough that I want to kick the tires. =)

This is a fantastic idea, Elle!

What about using the in-game Classified system to post it, under "Wanted"?

If I'm not mistaken, Classified ads can be updated after the fact - so if someone else wanted to pony up to the pool, they'd just need to get with the original ad poster.

If scripters knew to look *there* (or some other central place) - it just might work!

I'd hate settling for a Linden-provided solution for this.

Ideally, I'd want this to be sortable by bounty price, a ratings/feedback/history system for each participant, and a way to escrow the bounty so that the original submitter can't renege on the promised amount. Job submitters should be able to qualify their respondants based on previous history, automatically. I can think of a few more requirements.

Also, the classifieds mechanism is hobbled by the weekly reset. A custom system could let these jobs sit around until someone interested came along.

There's a framework for all of this, too. Just check out Google Answers or Amazon's Mechanical Turk. We're basically talking about the same thing, here. I'm sure there are more features we're not thinking of that could be stolen from those.

Even better, we needn't limit this to scripts. People could bounty textures, etc.

I'd like to see this done. It's worth a go to see how it exists, empirically. I often think of Resis who can't script as well as they'd like, who need jobs done. They may not have the ability, but they do have the funds.

Yeah, this perfectly describes me early on in my SL career. I didn't know dick about scripting, so I would pay other people to help me put things together. Eventually, hacking away at the library I'd been collecting, I was able to learn a lot about LSL and get to the point of being self-sufficient.

Getting in contact with people who could help wasn't always easy, though. I think this mechanism would provide numerous benefits in addition to the obvious ones. It would increase the flow of knowledge between individual residents in a way that is mutually beneficial to both parties. There would be a whole lot of education going on on a one-to-one basis that fairly compensates the educator. That's a really powerful thing.

Another thing:

Imagine how great this would be for sharpening people's skills? They could pick out a challenge, tackle it, get paid, and start on another one. That's a whole lot of opportunities to better one's skills, make connections and get noticed.

God damn, this needs to be built.

This idea gets the official Christopher Omega Seal of Approval.
Grade A thread content
==Chris

Great idea Elle! I had thought of a similar thing not too long ago. In my case, however, I was thinking more about top building and texturing techniques.

Most builders and designers are apprehensive about revealing details of those techniques that make the difference between them and the rest of the competition--and understandably so, of course. Baking textures, for instance, is one such technique. If you can do it, you have quite an advantage. If you cannot, you gotta work harder. People have asked about it in the forums but so far have gotten only generalities for an answer. BUT inquiring minds want to know more--and perhaps pay for it.

So, I had thought, what if we set up X Prizes for things that we wanted to learn (I was thinking about the Ansari X Prize). So a poster would start the SL X Prize For Baking Textures In Maya As Is Applied Toward Garment Design, for example. He would set up the rules (e.g., winning entry must be highly detailed, assume that the user has no working knowledge of Maya, etc.), the time duration (e.g., this contest finishes on March 1), whether the results should be made public or not, etc. In short, he'd be responsible for setting up the contest, judging who wins it, and collecting all the (monetary) contributions and delivering them to the winner. Non-monetary contributions, such as "whoever does this will have my undying love and affection forever," would have to be delivered by the contributors themselves

A really cool idea! Count with my help. And if you manage to get it going, this might make good article material for the MM

Have you seen this thread on baking textures / doing the effect by hand? There's some very detailled posts about different techniques from Neil Protagonist and Forseti Svarog.

As for the code bounty, I really like the idea, especially if the code is open-sourced after completition of the bounty. I don't see this as unfair competition to small businesses - there are already a lot of scripts in the wiki and the script library forum, and yet people still buy scripts, because buying a script usually entails buying service, support, someone that will help get the thing to work, plus of course having it tailored to exact specifications.

No, no. I don't think you have to worry. First of all, no solution will 'fit all uses'. I think what could be done, is more like building blocks, or general (but parameterable) scripts, and maybe some complete stuff.

But who can customize such code? Only programmers. So if a person has more needs that can be adjusted with just parameters, he will have to hire a coder.

If you have a special idea, you will also have to write it (or hire a coder) -- the advantage is that you don't have to start from scratch, you can use routines, code snippets -- like a library.

So, if someone wants an elevator -- there will be a script 'free'.
If someone wants an elevator that only works between specific times -- that's custom work. Or an elevator script that can cross sim borders, etc. There are always more possibilities...


BTW, what would be the license for these code? BSD-like or GPL-like?

Why stop there?

Let's get bounties going on PSP clothing files, poser animations, objects we can get full perms on!

I'd like to especially see bounties on anything that stuff that people who posted enthusiastically in this thread sell in RL or in SL.

Tell me how you make a living .. I want an open source bounty on it!

I just love programmers who espouse open source everything. My answer is, ok what's your business? Would you contribute to an open source version of that?

Why stop there?

Let's get bounties going on PSP clothing files, poser animations, objects we can get full perms on!

I'd like to especially see bounties on anything that stuff that people who posted enthusiastically in this thread sell in RL or in SL.

Tell me how you make a living .. I want an open source bounty on it!

I just love programmers who espouse open source everything. My answer is, ok what's your business? Would you contribute to an open source version of that?

Open source makes sense for underlying substrate that huge companies dominate to the detriment of innovation and the indepedentn programmer. Otherwise, it's just a way of getting cheaper labour.

There's a reason why scripters are hard to find and commissions are high. Many of the best builders and other folks avoid doing custom work, because they know how easy it is to get ripped off: you do a good job of something, and are rewarded with a lump sum and the promise of more work in the future, while the person who hired you gets continuous profit from the sale of the object without having to do more work. Pretty quickly you realise you're not actually making much money, and you're spending all your login time working on things that other people want, instead of things you want. A girl I knew when I started who was doing well at getting into scripting left the field completely because she wound up that way.

For scripters it's even worse, because scripting doesn't offer a way of expressing personality. You can't script yourself into looking like what you want to look like, or script yourself into living in your dream house. You can get them custom built, but then it's down to you being able to explain what you want and accepting that it probably won't match what you have in your head because people put different spins on things.

All of you folks frustrated by scripting, remember that there are folks out there for whom building things that look good (or even getting the sliders right on the Appearance panel) is as hard as scripting is for you. Think how much more frustrating that would be given the more visible, social, expressive role of those other skills.

If you want to avoid paying a commission you can't afford, and make custom scripting more popular, offer a percentage partnership instead of a lump sum. Yes, it's a gamble for the scripter, but the ones I've taken have all paid off pretty well. Adding yet more free stuff that scripters have to compete with, and that supports the "customise this once then you're done" model, is not what we need.

yeah, or try trading!

I'll script for people who build / texture stuff for me.

I like this idea a lot. Definitely worth a try to see how it goes.

Yes. I have a rather lucrative full-time job creating open source software. You might say it's a permanent bounty. The money doesn't come from sales, it comes from support. I'm sure there are plenty of smart people out there who never need to pay for support, but the remaining percentage is enough to pay for quite a lot of perks.

And, personally, my ideals extend into SL. With the exception of SOME extraordinarily nice models, I won't buy things that I can't edit. There is a furniture maker who makes BEAUTIFUL stuff, but it's all no-mod, so I won't buy from her. Just won't. Sorry.

Personally, I'd love to have access to the driving scripts for the Mambo Kallista or the Dominus Shadow, so I could make my own vehicles that handle like that. Having it certainly wouldn't have stopped me from buying the Shadow, or three Kallistas. Open source doesn't mean GPL.

First up, open source ice skates.

oh yay, let's all go work in tech support. that's where the big money is!

this model makes no sense at all. Why would I go to your company for tech support, just because you create open source software?

No, I'll go to the folks who give low cost, great tech support who don't have to pay for all those pointless open source engineers.

They just pay for super smart tech support people.