Exploring the idea of Feature Bounties

[gabehf]

I love FOSS, but the unfortunate truth is that my bank account does not look healthy enough to commit a lot of time to creating FOSS software, as much as I like to do it. Koito hasn't really been around for very long, and I still had to spend some time with minimal work on the project because sometimes I can't really afford to be doing free work.

At the same time, I am a committed believer in FOSS being truly free and open. I used the MIT license with Koito because it is (as far as I know) the most permissive license. I think that, within reasonable limits, if I can release a feature for free for everyone, I should.

In that vein, I've always been curious about the prospect of using "feature bounties" as a means of funding FOSS development. I personally learned about the idea from the app nzb360, which, although not FOSS, seems to use feature bounties to great success, releasing new features for free, paid for by only those who have the will and the means. I even wrote a post on the /r/selfhosted subreddit gauging sentiment on the idea before I ever started work on Koito (https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1jkmn37/honest_question_how_would_you_all_prefer/). I started wishing that software I use daily had feature bounties so I could at least try throwing what money I could spare on a feature I really wanted (looking at you, SSA subtitle support in Jellyfin).

All this is to say, there are some features - right now, multi user support - that I would like to add, but the amount of development effort it would take seems too great to do in a reasonable amount of time, especially given that soon I will probably have to stop working on Koito as much as I have been the past few weeks. But, I don't like the idea of just opening a feature bounty without first opening up a discussion to see what might be fair.

Let me know what you think. I made a quick display of what a bounty might look like in the README of branch explore/feature-bounties.

[PythonGermany]

I've learned in two blog posts from actualbudget/actual that they are experimenting with a similar concept: continuing-to-reward-contributors and next-steps-for-funding-contributors.

Maybe we/you can learn something from the feedback they have received and the experiences they made.