Type of site | Crowdfunding, bounties |
|---|---|
| Available in | English |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California , United States |
| URL | www |
| Commercial | Yes |
| Launched | 2003, relaunch in 2012 |
Bountysource was a crowdsourcing website for open source bounties and since 2012 also for crowdfunding. Users (called "backers") could pledge money for tasks using micropayment services that open-source software developers can pick up and solve to earn the money. It also allowed large-scale fundraising for big improvements on the project. It integrated with GitHub using its bug tracker to check if the problem is resolved and connect the resolution with GitHub's pull request system to identify the patch. When the users agree that they are satisfied and the project maintainer merged the proposed changes to the source-code, Bountysource would transfer the money acting as a trustee during the whole process. [1] [2]
Bountysource was started in the 2000s and by May 8, 2006, had integrated a new custom-built Subversion browser into the system. [3] On May 11, 2006, Bountysource released their Subversion browser, titled bsSvnBrowser, under the GNU General Public License. [4] The initial idea was to open-source more portions of Bountysource as time went on and the code matured to be a true open-source alternative to the proprietary SourceForge.net. The website was originally written in PHP, but as of March 18, 2006, it switched to Ruby on Rails. [5] Development on Bountysource was stopped in March 2008. [6]
It relaunched as a service using the GitHub-API in 2012 to focus on being a trustee for software development bounties that are collected through PayPal, Bitcoin, and other methods. [7] [8]
In 2017, the company was bought by a cryptocurrency company called CanYa.
In 2020 it was bought by a company named The Blockchain Group, which became the owner on July 1. [9] [10]
As of June 2023, Bountysource appears to have stopped paying bounties to developers with verified claims. The Blockchain Group also appears to have stopped responding to Bountysource users. [11] [12]
In November 2023, the Bountysource parent company announced it had filed for bankruptcy. [13]
As of May 2024, Bountysource website says "The site is temporarily down". [14]
Apache Subversion is a version control system distributed as open source under the Apache License. Software developers use Subversion to maintain current and historical versions of files such as source code, web pages, and documentation. Its goal is to be a mostly compatible successor to the widely used Concurrent Versions System (CVS).
Git is a distributed version control system that tracks versions of files. It is often used to control source code by programmers who are developing software collaboratively.
Mantis Bug Tracker is a free and open source, web-based bug tracking system. The most common use of MantisBT is to track software defects. However, MantisBT is often configured by users to serve as a more generic issue tracking system and project management tool.
The following tables describe attributes of notable version control and software configuration management (SCM) software systems that can be used to compare and contrast the various systems.
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A comparison of Subversion clients includes various aspects of computer software implementations of the client role using the client–server model of the Subversion revision control system.
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Arora is a discontinued free and open-source web browser developed by Benjamin C. Meyer. It was available for Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, FreeBSD, OS/2, Haiku, Genode, and any other operating system supported by the Qt toolkit. The browser's features included tabbed browsing, bookmarks, browsing history, smart location bar, OpenSearch, session management, privacy mode, a download manager, WebInspector, and AdBlock.
An open-source bounty is a monetary reward for completing a task in an open-source software project.
Kickstarter, PBC is an American public benefit corporation based in Brooklyn, New York, that maintains a global crowdfunding platform focused on creativity. The company's stated mission is to "help bring creative projects to life". As of February 2023, Kickstarter has received US$7 billion in pledges from 21.7 million backers to fund 233,626 projects, such as films, music, stage shows, comics, journalism, video games, board games, technology, publishing, and food-related projects.
In version control systems, a repository is a data structure that stores metadata for a set of files or directory structure. Depending on whether the version control system in use is distributed, like Git or Mercurial, or centralized, like Subversion, CVS, or Perforce, the whole set of information in the repository may be duplicated on every user's system or may be maintained on a single server. Some of the metadata that a repository contains includes, among other things, a historical record of changes in the repository, a set of commit objects, and a set of references to commit objects, called heads.
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RhodeCode is an open source self-hosted platform for behind-the-firewall source code management. It provides centralized control over Git, Mercurial, and Subversion repositories within an organization, with common authentication and permission management. RhodeCode allows forking, pull requests, and code reviews via a web interface.
Crowd Supply is a crowdfunding platform based in Portland, Oregon. The platform has claimed "over twice the success rate of Kickstarter and Indiegogo", and partners with creators who use it, providing mentorship resembling a business incubator.
Magit is an interface to the Git version control system, available as a GNU Emacs package written in Emacs Lisp. It is available through the MELPA package repository, on which it is the most-downloaded non-library package, with over 4.3 million downloads as of September 2024.
Flarum is Internet forum software written primarily in PHP, and a combination of JavaScript and TypeScript for its user interface. It was created as part of a merger of two existing forum software, FluxBB and esoTalk, and their two main developers, Franz Liedke and Toby Zerner.
Limit Theory is a cancelled real-time strategy video game developed by Josh Parnell under the Procedural Reality name. Parnell launched a Kickstarter campaign to crowdfund the development of the game in November 2012, with an intended release in early 2014. Although the campaign was successful, raising more than three times the required amount, the project eventually entered development hell. In September 2018, the title was officially cancelled. Since then, game's development has been used as an example of occupational burnout in indie video game development by some video game journalists.
Many open source projects (from phones to programming tools) have taken to crowd-funding sites (such as Kickstarter and indiegogo) in order to raise the cash needed for large-scale development. And, in some cases, this has worked out quite well.
