Bryce makes a good point in his latest post about Inkscape (and FOSS in general, as he points out). It is better to spend time hacking on something yourself than to offer someone $100 to do it for you. I think this is right and true for many reasons, one being that $100 is not very much money at all to pay someone for what usually ends up being quite a few hours of work.

But then there are people like me. I don’t have any coding skills at all. I don’t have enough time to pick them up. I really enjoy Ubuntu, I really like the concept of Open Source Software, and I want to help both of those things succeed. You tell me how I’m going to invest my time in a project like Inkscape. Or, even better, something simple like gTwitter, which could use some improvement. I’d love to figure out a way to help them along. I’d love pay a bounty in time to make a program I use all the time work like it should work, but I don’t have any usable skills that would help them along.

So paying your bounty in time is fine, as long as you have some sort of skill. But for the rest of us? The Joe Blows of the world who use open source software but don’t give much back? What about us?

Tags: foss, questions, Ubuntu