Gentoo Bug Bounties

Some may have noticed that the Gentoo Foundation has funded a bug bounty. This is something fairly new for the Foundation, and I wanted to offer some comments on the practice. Please note that while I’d love to see some of these make their way into policy some day, these are nothing more than my own opinion, and I reserve the right to change my opinion as we gain experience.

The recent bug bounty was for bug #418431, which was to address a problem with git-svn which was holding up stabilization of the latest version of git, which is a blocker for the migration of the Portage tree to git.

What follows are some principles for the use of bug bounties and how I think we fared in this particular case. I’d like to see the use of bounties expand, as right now I believe we under-utilize our donations. However, it is important that bounties be used with care as they have the potential to cause harm or be wasteful.

One more upfront note – I supported the git-svn bounty as it was ultimately worded, as did the other Trustees. Looking back I think we could have done things a little differently, but hindsight is always 20/20, and no doubt we’ll continue to learn as we experiment with this further.