[Xeron]

Heres an idea. How about Precentral set up a webOS bounty page?

People could create bounties such as "Port 2.2.4 to original Pre and Pixi", or "Port webOS to Samsung Galaxy SII".

People send paypal payments to a special account.

Once a developer steps up to tackle the task, the bounty is assigned to him and a deadline set. If the dev achieves the goal in the allotted time, the bounty is awarded to him. If not, the bounty can be reverted to unassigned, or if clear demonstrable progess has been made, maybe the deadline can be extended.

If a bounty isn't claimed after a set period, all money is refunded, or the people who donated can choose another bounty for their sum to go to.

For really large scale projects, they can be split into milestones where a % of the funds can be earned for each milestone reached.

This is quite common in the Amiga world (and popular, too, as you can see there is an assigned bounty for porting Firefox to the Amiga, which is assigned and has reached over $5500!)

[Greg Mair]

this would take a lot of man hours to keep organized.

keep it simple and just donate when you feel the dev has done something you will use.

[HelloNNNewman]

Search for the word "bounty" and you will see that this has been brought up several times by other members over the past couple of years.

[kalel33]

this would take a lot of man hours to keep organized.

keep it simple and just donate when you feel the dev has done something you will use.

Can't be that hard, Android community did it themselves to set up a bounty of over $2000 to get the Android port over to the Touchpad.

[ursula]

I don't think it's fair to give deadlines considering the developer is the one doing the work. I agree with Greg Mair. Just ask the developer how long he/she thinks it will take and if it goes passed that time, leave them bee.

[laoh]

How do groups like Cyanogenmod operate? They seem to have things under control... Who runs the show? Where do they get funding or devices? How do they decide which device gets worked on? Who works on them?

[kalel33]

How do groups like Cyanogenmod operate? They seem to have things under control... Who runs the show? Where do they get funding or devices? How do they decide which device gets worked on? Who works on them?

Here's a good article about Cyanogenmod. They make money off of donations. It also took them a long time to build up to their level and had many people helping out. To get WebOS teams together that would be as good, you'd have to have a lot of donations, highly skilled people with resources, willingness, know how, and the community that would pony up the money to support these devs. Cyanogenmod wasn't built overnight and they have their hands full with Android, so WebOS is probably going to have to find their own "Cyanogenmod" team.

Modders Make Android Work the Way You Want | Gadget Lab | Wired.com

[renater]

The idea around creating bounties for apps is great in its essence.
But the challenge is to find a trustworthy and credible organisation like Webosnation or Webosinternalz prepared to invest time and money in this. E.g. Setting up and running a site, scavenging all the forums to find ideas, addressing the needs of most of the WebOS users, launching a proposal for a bounty and setting the rules, 'selling' that and get the bounty money in e.g. A Paypal account, screening a credible and willing developer, keeping an eye whether development goes according to the rules and finally accepting the end product. Sounds like a lot of work. Any volunteers for 2013?

[kalel33]

The idea around creating bounties for apps is great in its essence.
But the challenge is to find a trustworthy and credible organisation like Webosnation or Webosinternalz prepared to invest time and money in this. E.g. Setting up and running a site, scavenging all the forums to find ideas, addressing the needs of most of the WebOS users, launching a proposal for a bounty and setting the rules, 'selling' that and get the bounty money in e.g. A Paypal account, screening a credible and willing developer, keeping an eye whether development goes according to the rules and finally accepting the end product. Sounds like a lot of work. Any volunteers for 2013?

Android does that all the time in XDA. People donate to get apps made and many apps are developed for free and then they accept donations. I keep reading articles and postings here saying the users and dev community far exceed other OS dev communities, so there shouldn't be a problem to get this going, get a bunch of dev teams like Cyanogen team(and the tons of other custom ROM devs), bounty for WebOS to Android hardware, and donating to devs to develop requested apps.

[rwhitby]

To get WebOS teams together that would be as good, you'd have to have a lot of donations, highly skilled people with resources, willingness, know how, and the community that would pony up the money to support these devs. Cyanogenmod wasn't built overnight and they have their hands full with Android, so WebOS is probably going to have to find their own "Cyanogenmod" team.

I wonder where we could find such ...

-- Rod

[Xeron]

I don't think it's fair to give deadlines considering the developer is the one doing the work.

The point of the deadline is just to avoid the situation where a bounty gets assigned to a developer, who then (for whatever reason) isn't able to commit to the task. If the deadline is reached, and the dev has made significant progress, there would be no harm in agreeing an extension.

scavenging all the forums to find ideas,

The idea is to have a dedicated bounty system, where people submit bounty suggestions. See the amigabounty site linked in the first post for an example of a bounty system.

addressing the needs of most of the WebOS users,

This is the whole point; bounty schemes mean that the most wanted features accrue the largest sums and the developers will be more likely to tackle those first.