Updates to the Bounties page

Please take a look at the Bounties page to see some updates (more to follow).

We’ve added an important bounty to get work properly under way on improving the RISC OS file system, with the long-term aim being to support (amongst many other things) files larger than 2GB, large (e.g. TB sized) hard drives, multiple partitions, extended meta-data, etc.

We have also expired a couple of unpopular bounties and redistributed any money that was in those pots across the other bounties.

“We have also expired a couple of unpopular bounties and redistributed any money that was in those pots across the other bounties.”

If my understanding is correct, people chose specific bounties to donate too, if so then you really shouldn’t redistribute the promise of cash to projects that they may well have no interest in paying up for.

https://www.riscosopen.org/content/documents/bounties

Please see the section “What happens if a bounty is never claimed” and note the text highlighted in bold.

People who donated are aware of this and must have been happy with it, else they would not have donated.

Incidentally, one of the expired pots had accumulated precisely no donations whatsoever the whole time the bounty scheme has been running. We’re not expiring things arbitrarily!

Incidentally, one of the expired pots had accumulated precisely no donations whatsoever the whole time the bounty scheme has been running

And the other bounty only managed to attract £20 since April!

…you really shouldn’t redistribute the promise of cash to projects…

While we’re kicking this one to death, don’t forget this page – which is linked to from clicking on the “info” icon for each bounty’s status.

With any luck, there are enough warnings on our bounty pages to avoid any people getting too upset if we ever did have to expire a bounty which had attracted a reasonable amount of money. Given that’s not an easy decision to make, I’m sure we’d run it past people in the forums first, anyway.

And the other bounty only managed to attract £20 since April!

A quick glance at the bounties page suggests that was the keyboard shortcuts in the filer bounty. If memory serves, when I put some money into the bounties, I put some into the development loan system bounty, and a much smaller amount – £10 – into the keyboard shortcuts bounty. If so, that £20 consists of my £10 and ROOL’s matched £10.

My logic was that by putting a token amount in, it might help ‘kickstart’ donations to that bounty – but it obviously didn’t; clearly, nobody else has any interest in that bounty. Therefore I have no problem with that tenner being redistributed, which I knew could happen anyway.

Yes, two of the benefits of our redistributing the closing bounty across the other ones (as opposed to giving the money back), are:

• the other bounties benefit
• the money ROOL put in to match donations stays in the pool of bounties, rather than going back into the unpaid “matching” pool