Saturday, February 11, 2012

[vchvdyod] Donating to a bug

There's a bug in a piece of software that you would like to see fixed, so you donate money to the organization that would fix it. However, this is not a bug bounty to avoid the difficulty of figuring out who earns the money (if many people were involved). Instead, it is a speech act, to call attention to a bug, similar to the "votes" mechanism in Bugzilla, but less likely to be astroturfed. It gives a hint to software developers to prioritize which bugs are more important.

While open source software with a public bug tracker is one use case, another is for closed source proprietary software. A publicly recorded bug with a lot of money behind it that hasn't gotten fixed serves as a criticism of the company. For this, a third party would have to manage, or at least count, the donated funds.

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