I don’t think this will change the way openHAB will further develop.
Giants like Linus Torvalds operate on the same principles. The work may be funded but will remain open source.
We should not worry about this, we should hope that there is a chance that some parts might speed up!
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Oops… I didn’t mean to start a war of words 
Also did not know this was a reminder and already exists… “introducing” does not really fit the reminding theme…
The discussion is an interesting one, and for all it is worth, it has shed some light for me on this topic.
I reckon the key points to take away are:
a) code remains open source
b) maintainers control what gets included
c) a bounty can potentially progress a cause
And bounty or not… I would like to thank all for their work and support; without it, OH would have been the usual download you get in a whim and then figure it is too hard and forget about it.
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I will try to just use BonutySource, my only issue is that it does not get much exposure.
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I like this approach.
I’ll stay as sustaining member of the Foundation cause at the moment i don’t have enough time to invest it in the project.
Yeah - with the Bounties, i’ll have the option to force things with my money and the development goes back to OH!
Now if we could get this integrated into the forum…
I joke of course.
I’ll add my comments and agree with most. I see this as nothing but a good thing. People have been paying for the development of features as long as I’ve been using OH. All BountySource adds is integrating this more closely with Github and adding better assurances that the code developed gets contributed back to the project.
I really do not see the amount of money that is going to be involved will be large enough to impact the direction of overall development or this community at all. At least not for the foreseeable future. But the amount of money involved can help to satisfy motivated users by encouraging some developers to implement their desires.
I remember seeing all these same arguments against this sort of thing when Patreon came out. I’m happy to say that all these years later none of the doom and gloom predictions have come to pass.
Call me an optimist but I think this is a good thing.
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Finally! I can now quit my daytime job and devote my life entirely to openHAB development 
Seriously though, I don’t think this will change anything. I’ll still be fixing stuff that I need fixed, I’ll help debug a rule here and there. Write some scripts, html, whatever to help others out.
I don’t think I’ll be coding for a bounty any time soon because I’m afraid that that will take the fun away for me. Then you get paid and it becomes work.
On the other hand, if it were for the candy bar…
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I’d like to bring in another point from the “non-developer-side”: for me there are always 4 options in case I need a feature:
- I ask the forum and hope to find someone who is willing to spend time for my desired feature.
- I can forgo.
- I can invest money into another techology that is hopefully (better) compatible with OH.
- I can invest my money into a piece of code that solves my problem and contributes to OH.
For me it is absolutely an option to go with option 4. Instead of giving the money to a vendor I can give my money to a developer. I would even dare to say that this is the better option since
- it resolves my problem and avoids that I have 2 different technologies that are actually doing the same
- makes even the technology/product of the vendor better/more attractive
- gives something to the community
Regards
John
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The second part of this is to also file a feature request issue on the appropriate repo. The forum is great for discussion and should be a first place to post, but if an issue isn’t created, nothing will happen.
I also think a issue is required to link up with BountySource.
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You are making a giant leap here that is totally unwarranted.
I agree with you, I would not recommend a crowd-funded nor an opensource project without some sort of corporate backing for a critical system where safety is involved. But I don’t see how that has anything at all to do with BountySource. Perhaps you wouldn’t, but many people are more than willing to pay to add a feature here or fix a bug there to improve their non-critical use of openHAB.
Just because money becomes involved doesn’t mean someone is putting lives on the line in their use of OH.
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I still think there is a lot of middle ground.
If I understand you, you are saying this is a binary choice.
Either the system can only be a toy or you just pay a lot of money to a company for support.
There is a vast middle ground between those two extremes.
And even if there isn’t, the whole argument is completely orthogonal to whether there is benefit to the BountySource program which can encourage the opensource developers who are donating their time to focus on a particular problem that a user or users have a particular interest in. And they often are not tiny little problems but requests for new bindings or major changes to the core.
And then that little fix becomes part of the baseline in perpetuity. It doesn’t get lost. It doesn’t get forgotten. It isn’t withheld from the community. And if your argument were true (i.e. it requires a corporation to invest money to produce anything worthwhile) OH itself wouldn’t exist. Because, according to your argument, no one would have put together the pieces without that “magical money”.
The very existance of openHAB and all the rest of the very successful open source projects belie that argument.
And frankly, one of the reasons your efforts to produce your commercial OH system or whatever it is you are producing is received so negatively here is because it is antithetical to open source. You are building off of the backs of tens of thousands of hours of donated time from hundreds of volunteers and giving nothing back so you can make your “magical money”. What you are doing is perferctly legal (given the Eclipse License) and good luck to you. But expect the volunteers whose donation of work and time to the community frown on someone taking their efforts and profiting from them without giving back to the community, and then belittling their contributions as unworthy and forgettable because they were not paid.
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Hinting at money is not offering millions of dollars to anyone. Make a concrete offer and then you will be talking. So far you have developed a single proprietary binding and suggest there is money to be made with absolutely no details.
So it frankly looks like you are trying to cash in on the work of others. It’s perfectly legal but do not expect the rest of the devs to like it.
I can’t even begin to express how insulting this statement is to the OH developers. Because they don’t make money they do not stand behind their code?
I hope you are not planning on having any customers for users of this forum. After this statement I know I would go out of my way to avoid any product you have to offer.
You clearly do not understand the open source community and what motivates its members.
Then why are you using it? Why are you trying to build some sort of commercial offering off of it?
Go use your millions to pay some people to build a competitor.
But as someone who has read almost every single posting on this forum I can definitively say this statement is false.
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I like it. Come on here. Shit on everyone’s efforts and insult them. Then leave. And we are the bad guys?
Go look at Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat, and all the other companies that invest in open source projects. What do they do? They pay people to contribute to the open source baseline. They contribute.
What have you offered? Hits at money no one can take seriously, insults, and a business model that does not contribute back to the open source baseline.
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Not just because you talked about money.
You have basically said that all the tens of thousands of man hours the developers have freely contributed to the project without being paid is worthless because they were not paid.
Well, then I think we can chalk this up to a misunderstanding. Text is an imperfect medium for communication, doubly so when the majority of the users on the forum are not native English speakers.
I would still maintain that if any findings you make do not get reported as issues and/or PRs are not provided to correct them that is less useful to the openHAB community than a donation of money to the foundation. We always welcome donations but the foundation and would be very appreciative, but the foundation is set up to support OH, not profit off of it (it is literally incorporated or whatever the correct word is in Germany as a non-profit).
I should also note, if it isn’t already obvious, I only speak for myself. I do not speak for openHAB or the openHAB Foundation.
I think we all have a much better understanding of what you are doing. We look forward to what you can accomplish. Sounds like you are doing right by the community.
I’m gald we cleared up the misunderstanding.
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Do we have an overview how much money was invested so far?
I am new to BountySource to look it up myself.
All, just ftr: Ganesh asked to have his account (+posts) deleted, so you will find this thread in a pretty weird state as many posts have disappeared. I also took the liberty to remove the latest discussion of today, which didn’t have much point anymore without seeing the full context of the conversation.
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thank you.
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