2013/9/20 Bryce Harrington <bryce@...961...>:
When Inkscape started there were several bug-bounty projects in operation which we watched drift into non-success. I suspect that's why many of us have been a bit skeptical about the feasibility of bug bounties generally. But it's definitely gotten a lot of discussion. By now there must be some good "best practices" identified, so maybe it's just a matter of having someone come up with a plan.
The way I see it, Inkscape is just very complex and fixing bugs correctly requires a rather deep knowledge of its idiosyncratic architecture, which is moreover poorly documented. The limiting factor is not money, but insufficient manpower / lack of knowledge.
For instance, some time ago one guy offered a bounty of $100 for fixing a bug related to selecting clipped objects. I only managed to fix it because I refactored the entire rendering code and in the process understood how it could be fixed.
When it comes to development funding, I have the following to share: One of the professors at my university is interested in funding the development of an open-source cross-platform chemical drawing package which could produce publication quality drawings and understand ChemDraw format files supplied by publishers. At present, there are no open source programs which can do this - their output is typically poor quality. He suggested that implementing this program as an extension for Inkscape might be the way to go, because implementing the chemical drawing functionality is comparably minor work when compared to implementing all the generic drawing functionality already present in Inkscape.
This indicates that we could probably gain significant funding from niche users who would use Inkscape as a platform upon which to build a specialty editor. The CAD / electronics work by Sebastian also shows that we could gain a lot by expanding the scope of our extension APIs.
Regards, Krzysztof