Just been reading this article on coding horror, and wondered if you’d be interested in accepting proposals for paid development (not that I have any right now though).
It’s an interesting notion. The problem I have with mercenary work is that it tends to wreak havoc in terms of upsetting priorities. We have our roadmap, and if someone showed up with a suitcase of money and wanted us to work on something completely different, it wouldn’t necessarily sit well with me.
On the other hand, that’s why we keep our roadmap pretty under wraps, in hopes of something showing up and offering us oodles on money to work on something we’re already planning to work on.
I was a bit involved with the horde project (http://horde.org - nice suite of web mail/collaboration/other tools based on a common framework) a while back, and they had a snazzy way of dealing with this.
Effectively, they popped up a simple web page where bounties were published. Any individual/entity could issue a bounty for a feature they wanted, and, anyone could sit down, code away and claim the bounty, providing they were the first to submit their code and have it committed to CVS - obviously the ‘main’ developers had a big advantage here, but I don’t recall anyone ever finding themselves in the position where they just missed out.
I wonder if the page is still there… oh yes it is http://www.horde.org/bounties/ - looks like they’ve change the rules a little since then… the new rules look even better.
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