Idea: LSL Bounties?

Don't get me wrong. I believe in open source. SL, for example, would be great as open source.

But every project is not a nail to be hit by the open source hammer.

Yea, but wait until someone asks for help with a script you made and try saying "actually, there's nothing wrong with it, you're just doing it wrong, I'll tell you the right way for L$150" and see how that goes.

It's not quite that - it's that open source was originally meant to be to the programmer's benefit. Linus made Linux open-source, not just because he wanted other people to be able to use it for free, but because he wanted to benefit from other people working on it. GIMP is open source because the people working on it enjoy writing art packages but know that if they each did it on their own, they wouldn't be able to produce something good enough to get noticed in the real world.

Paying programmers to write scripts to order and then open source them just so others don't have to pay - whether or not they enjoy writing them and whether or not they care about improved versions of them - isn't supposed to be what open source is about. If you look on SourceForge it's full of empty project pages where somebody started a project in the hope they'd get a piece of software they wanted for free because other people would work on it. Nice try

You can buy books about Rockefeller and many other rich people. It will tell you how they become millionaires, how they made a living.

It won't help you much, though.

BTW, open sourcing EVERY script in SL would be silly.

However, providing an open source (BSD or LGPL like) script library and some building blocks (scripts) would benefit everyone. Programmers, builders, etc.

Yes I have Jackal. I had skimmed it once. It related to building, I believe, using Lightwave or Photoshop. But, what if I wanted to bake buildings' shadows in 3DS max, or the highlights of a leather dress in Maya? How is this done? The way things are right now, you would have to learn a good chunk of Maya in order to be able to shade a leathery piece of clothing--which is quite ridiculous I think. So, if enough ppl found themselves in the same predicament, they could set up a bounty and see if they can get a nice tutorial that does exactly that.

Anyway, this was just one idea. I can see this thing being used to tackle all sorts of problems. Bounties could be set up for the construction of building tools, importers/exporters, better documentation than what SL provides, a bow-tie set of linked prims, etc, etc. There's so many things that are sorely lacking in SL. This could be one more way of getting a few of these things done. It's worth a try I think.

I really don't see why the bounty system has to mean open source.

There are some people who, paying for a bounty, would probably want the fruits of the bounty kept private. While others would want to share. I think either option is fine. It's a matter of choice.

Me, personally, I don't make money because of my scripts. I make money because the scripts work inside of a product that's really cool. If an exploit made all of my scripts public tomorrow, it wouldn't really matter, since their real power is working together within a cool product that only I know how to imagine, improve and design. I'd re-write any security issues there were exposed with the sploit and move on with life. It wouldn't be a big deal for me.

But way to blaze another path, Anna.

Looks like some resmod thinks this thread is really cool.

coco

This is exactly the point, though.

Right now scripters can partner with good builders to increase the value of both of their work - but unless they're careful, the scripter tends to get the bum end of the deal, because the builder knows the scripter can't access the market at all without him (when was the last time you bought an unboxed piece of LSL?). This isn't always the case - there's some items out there that are very simply built but succeed because of their scripts - but it's pretty common.

If it becomes the case that scripters have to partner with builders for their work to have any value at all, because it is the only way to differentiate their work from stuff that's available for free, then the scripters will have to take bad deals all the time, every time.

I'm all for an LSL bounty. Open-sourced, closed-source, doesn't matter; after all, if one doesn't want their work to be open source, they can simply elect not to do it.


- Newfie

The problem is when you spend hours or days or weeks working on a script for something only to have someone else release a worse version open source, and then see any income you could have made from your work go poof because a) it's difficult to compete against a free product and b) you can't explain to customers why your version is better because they don't care, or it's "too techie" for them to understand.

Not necessarily true.

Makaio and I have that same general setup in Tiny Seadog. We both build, but he's the only scripter. We get far more inquiries into solo scripting work than, say, solo custom textures (which I do) - in general I'd say the number of inquiries regarding just scripting jobs is roughly equal to the inquiries we get about custom builds overall. Because of the complexity and time involved in custom scripting - especially for the crazy stuff that not everyone can do - Makaio can generally name his price.


Re: the bounty system - even though it might mean less work coming our way, I think its a fantastic idea for scripters of all skill levels AND consumers.

Sure - you can get good money by doing custom scripting, but as I said above, the problem is that it gets a lot harder once you start to want to do what you want to do instead of what someone else wants you to do.

As I say, if you get tired of paying high prices for custom scripts, imagine what it's like having to pay custom work fees every time you want something built out of prims (unless you want it to look awful)

I can see your point on that. The difference being (in my opinion, from what I've seen) is that the ratio of quality scripters to quality builders in SL is really skewed. With practice, most people can become at least decent builders - scripting seems to be a skill that is harder to wrap your head around. For every really good scripter I know, I could name at least 10 builders that are of good to excellent quality.

And, like you said, its more difficult to market yourself as a scripting-only artisan. That may be why scripters appear to be so far and few between in SL. The bounty program may entice all these "invisible" scripters out of the woodwork.

Finally, the give-and-take between builders and scripters isn't entirely one-sided. If I took my work solo, I could offer really pretty looking objects that don't do anything but sit there. Given the ever-increasing amount of competition in SL, its much harder to sell something that doesn't have scripted bells and whistles. I think scripters have the upper hand in a lot of these situations.

None of that though is related to it being an LSL bounty. Those circumstances happen already. If anything, an LSL bounty helps in reducing that risk - after all, if one can see an item is in high demand on the LSL bounty list, one will have a hint that it may or may not be a script one wants to make.


- Newfie

Well, I think part of the reason for this - and the split - is that the two actually require fairly different mindsets.

For an item I'm working on at the moment I contacted some folks who I thought to be good builders for parterships and I've recieved some absolutely fantastic models, and looking at them the thought I'm having over and over again is "I'd never have thought of that, because I didn't know you could do it". Whenever I try and visualise a design in my head, I always wind up just thinking of sticking prims together; I don't have the scope, that these folks seem to have, to keep my imagination free enough to come up with creative and imaginative shapes while at the same time funneling it enough to come up with something that can be made out of prims.

The building position - of having a very small number of building blocks, but which can be tweaked in thousands of different ways - is fundamentally different to the scripting position of having hundreds of building blocks but each one only does one thing. I suspect it'll be a rare and talented person indeed who can be highly competent at both at the same time. And for every person who's frustrated at the "tekkies" talking in jargon or baffling them, there's probably someone else just as frustrated at the "arties" who don't explain anything at all because for them it's a subconscious process. (The book Chip recommended, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, describes this sort of thing brilliantly.)

Yeah, I'd really hate to see this great thread head down the ol' "SL is impossible and unfair " road.

The bounty system ensures a meritocracy on both ends of the equation -- people on the buy side get the best quality their price will buy them and people on the supply side get the best money their skill will earn them. And like I said, this easily applies to other creative tasks.

The bounty system, yes - although that's essentially equivalent to the hiring of scripters right now. The open source bounty system, no.

Been there. - The AV transporter. For when Sit-Teleportation doesn't cut it. Not in active use anymore, Cubey's is better.
Done That. - Linked Turrets, never completed, possible use later when sim crossings are better.
Got The T-Shirt - Authentication Server, I've had a demand for something like it, I was just using llSameGroup, but I'll need a full-bore list checker. I should repost it.

The Code Bounty works. Especially when I just want sometthing to work without turning my brain to mush doing it when someone else can crank it out.
Looking back. I notice a recurring poster. Sadly, the resident that helped me set a Linked Turret solution is a on-again off-again college student, but she did a good job on it.

I've seen too many programs and tools vanish over the years because they were closed source, and the company went out of business not because they were out-competed by open source, but because they just weren't popular enough tools to support a commercial product for the long term.

Some of them have been turned into open source projects and bounced back... either because they were open-sourced by the original company, or they were re-implemented.

Some things just don't work out in the commercial market, but DO work well as open source. And some things work well as both. There's commercial products using open-source scripts all through SL. My own open-source projects and the ones I prefer to work on are commerce-friendly: you can use them in your products without having to release their versions of the code. Some companies don't, some do... but it's THEIR call.
I will. I have. I know of one product that's using my flight script already, and it's only been out a month.

I want to single out this quote because I think it sums up some of the major misconceptions about this idea.

First off, I said it back on page 1 and Enabran said it above: this in no way has to be limited to open source projects.

Secondly, the purpose of a bounty system is not to produce open source or knock-off versions of other people's products, but to make it easier to find people for custom jobs and products that don't yet exist. There would be little point, for example, in offering a L$200 or higher bounty for scripted ice skates when I can buy them in-world from Moopf for L$75. Now, if I wanted a feature set in a pair of skates that Moopf was unable or unwilling to provide, then that would probably be fair game for a bounty. Or Moopf himself, if he was getting a lot of feature requests and didn't have time to do them all could offer bounties on them himself (although that's harder to do with a closed source script).


In reading the replies, I've thought of a few features that would be good to include in the SL version of a bounty system.

- The ability for someone posting a bounty to specify the perms they want on a project, possibly even a way to set different prices for different perms (i.e. 2k for a closed source version, 5k for full perms).

- The abaility for prospective scripters to make "counter offers", the price and terms they would want to see before they considered the project. If they considered L$2k to be too low for a large-scale project, they could suggest a higher price. Or "There's no way I'll do a full perm version of this but I might consider copy/transfer/no mod".

- A comments section to handle things like "This allready exists in-world, here's how to find it", or "does anyone want to team up on this?" or "this is a rediculious bounty" or "I need more details in the description" or...or...




Bingo.

Oh, yeh, I can script like the dickens, but I'm lousy at photoshop, I don't have Poser, and I'd love some custom animations and textures that go beyond what I have.

What about just adding a "bounties" page to the Wiki?

The "on-again, off-again" coder is another reason I like the idea of bounties. If you've ever put a down payment for a comission for someone who then proceeds to go "off-again" or you want to make some $L scripting but you're too busy to do full-time stuff in SL, you know that I mean.

As for bounties non-scripting projects...well, being a budding texture artist and a busy college student, I wouldn't mind being able to pick up the occasional bounty for a custom texture. For other things like building projects, I'm not sure if the same or a different system would be applicable but it's worth discussing.

A Wiki page or a forum thread would be the logical starting place, but I think down the road, we'd want some more features. Some things that have allready been mentioned:





(bolded emphasis mine).

Should be noted if if we have an escrow mechanism in place, there should also be a way for someone to withdraw their contribution if a solution has not yet been submitted so their L$ won't be forever tied up in a bounty no one's taking.

Edit: One I forgot. A way for the scripter to determine how much time investment they want to put into something after the fact. Accepting a one-off script job should not have to entail "tech support for life" services on that item.

Definitely.

The way Google answers does this, their Answer people can pick a question and then "check it out" so that only they are permitted to work on it. If they decide that they don't want to answer the question after all, they can check it back in. This prevents people duplicating work, etc. There are also time limits to check out, I believe. I think if a bounty has not been checked out, the submitter would just cancel the job and be refunded the money.