Sponsoring KiCad improvements by "bounties"

One way to help improve Open Source projects is by offering “bounties” to developers providing specific bug fixes, feature enhancements etc. One such platform is Bountysource - other platforms are available. Bountysource charge a fee to maintain the service. Some may view this is an unwarranted free market intrusion into Open Source, others may view this a reasonable fee for a useful “added value” service.

Bountysource integrates with repositories hosted on github, so KiCad source repo is not there, but KiCad libraries are. However, it is is possible to create a dummy repo, which can be used to track and award bounties, even if the KiCad source code is maintained in launchpad.

It might be obvious, but worth saying - any submitters hoping to get a bounty must be prepared to engage with KiCad devs or library maintainers to get a submission to an acceptable standard.

If anyone thinks this is a good idea, it would be easy to set up, but right now I believe that bounties could be placed on KiCad library issues.

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There is a code mirror on github. Would this be enough?

I looked for that on Bountysource, but I couldn’t find it. I am not sure, but I guess Bountysource only pick up certain repos.

Oh, just realised, Bountysource needs a repo with Issues enabled, kicad-source-mirror has issues disabled.

I believe that’s because all tracking is done via the main repo on Luanchpad and the mailing list.