Re: Abandoned patch countdown 20111003

[David Kastrup]

"address@hidden" <address@hidden> writes:

>     Issue 737: Enhancement: support for footnotes and/or endnotes.
>     
>
> If you could leave this up for another week, that'll give me time to
> collect the bounty on it.

I don't find that keeping a patch back helps.  I tried work for hire
(sending the respective patches in private after agreeing on a price and
keeping back the code from upstream in the hope of payment) as well as
committing to the code base.  Neither worked as to yet.  Also there is a
tendency to keep asking for more than in the original specs, vastly
inflating the effort.  Notwithstanding, I have about $500 outstanding
and nothing paid.  On the plus side, I promptly paid for a set of
accordion font glyphs for which I had offered a bounty, so the bounty
system sometimes does work.

Since a reward loses its meaning if you need to invest weeks of
bartering, running after people, sending out payment reminders and so
on, my take on this is that we should either turn this into an official
thing where an independent party does the vetting and likely gets the
money in advance in escrow, or scrap it altogether.

As a system of honor, it does not work and thus is rather a disincentive
for contributors than otherwise.

-- 
David Kastrup