[mythtv-users] Per Card Volume Control Bounty started

[Daniel Walton]

> >> I think what you are trying to do is well-intentioned but
> >> impractical.
> >>
> >> $500 US is less than you could make flipping burgers at a Manhattan
> >> McDonalds for two weeks,  the actual value of performing such a
> >> project on the open market is probably closer to $5000 or probably
> >> more. At that level accounting protections would be a necessity, and
> >> I think the IRS would begin to take an interest as well.
> >
> > I don't think the goal of this proposed bounty system is to try to pay the
> > devs what they would make on the open market for their work.  They are all
> > doing the work for free right now and $500 is a lot more than $0 so it seems
> > like a good idea to me.
>
> What you say is true, and I think it proves my point that the developers are
> not motivated by dollars.
>
> But what is being talked about is causing a developer to do something that he
> or she would not otherwise do by offering money, and I think this will fail.

I can see how you would get a lot of bounties that would never be collected.
For instance someone offers $50 for a dev to port MythTV to run on his PSP
(playstation handheld)...its a neat idea but how many MythTV users own PSPs and
would contribute enough to the bounty to make it worth a dev's time.  That would
be lot of man hours of work for a very small audience so the odds of it being
collected seem low.

The flip side is you take a different feature like the ability to record
multiple sub-channels from the same frequency on digital cable or OTA HDTV.
There are a lot of HDTV users out there that would probably contribute to this
bounty (I'm one of them) so I could see the $$$ getting high enough to catch a
developer's interest.  It would probably be a dev who happened to want this
feature anyway and the $$$ is enough to push him over the edge to begin working
on it.

>
> But as I said, I'd certainly love to be proved wrong.

me too :)

Daniel