Extend Firefox, win stuff: The joy of the bounty

March 21, 2008

Mozilla has launched the Extend Firefox 3 contest, with some pretty cool prizes in the offing for the winners (including a MacBook Air). The purpose? To encourage more and better add-ons for Firefox.It’s similar in many ways to Atlassian’s $30,000 bounty program, which is giving away $5,000 bounties for individual plug-ins built for Jira, Confluence, and its other software.

Bounty programs have been around for years. The Ximian team used these somewhat effectively early on at Novell (and prior to that), which was my first experience with them. Since then, the number of bounties has grown considerably within the open-source world.

I personally am not a big fan of bounties, as I don’t think they go to the heart of why many developers write open-source code in the first place: pride of ownership, experimentation, intellectual pursuit.

But, if nothing else, they do call attention to a need (More plug-ins for Firefox and the Atlassian projects, in this case). It’s not as if Mozilla is hurting for Firefox plug-ins. But it may be that it’s trying to remind developers to update their Firefox 2 plug-ins for Firefox 3, and this offers a convenient, relatively inexpensive way to do so.