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jberkel / sms-backup-plus

Backup Android SMS, MMS and call log to Gmail / Gcal / IMAP
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zegoggles.smssync
Apache License 2.0
1.8k stars 497 forks source link

Encourage Bountysource? #910

Open jcrben opened 6 years ago

jcrben commented 6 years ago

I'm thinking we could encourage Bountysource - posted a $10 bounty for https://github.com/jberkel/sms-backup-plus/issues/647

Sustainability of open-source software is a long-term, known problem - the incentives are skewed as the people who put in the work aren't usually rewarded.

I'm noticing that people are struggling with bugs, but these are often difficult to reproduce and the reporters aren't usually up for debugging. If they got together and pooled some money, maybe these bugs could be fixed? Hard to say because they could be device-specific, but perhaps we could prominently encourage people to post Bountysource bounties for their bugs.

This project isn't ideal in some respects for Bountysource because it's got this reproducibility issue - without the specific device, it might be hard to fix the problem.

kurahaupo commented 4 years ago

Sounds like a good idea in principle. An alternative would simply be to pledge to buy a donation/upgrade through Google Play.

The reproducibility is further hampered by:

  1. Most users don't actually know which subsystem is at fault, and it can remain unclear whether two reports are or are not caused by the same underlying issue.
  2. What fixes one user's bug might cause a bug for other users.

What happens when a paid bugfix has to be rolled back because it negatively affects more users than it fixes?