Abstract:
Bounty programs are commonly used in FLOSS communities to motivate developers for the tasks which are not of their primary interest by providing monetary incentives. These tasks include creating new programs, improving the security of an existing software, solving a specific bug, giving product improvement suggestions, helping maintain the codebase and preparing documentation. In this paper, we describe the impact of a bounty program on a corporation, an individual developer and a project. We analyze the rational response to a bounty by applying the model in Selby Jr. and Beranek (1981).