Michael McCracken mentions a nice idea for a foundation dedicated to soliciting and publicising open source bounties, originally proposed here by Nat Friedman.

The idea is to connect up people who are offering money for enhancements to open source software with programmers who have the time and the skills to do the work.

Nice idea - I’m quite tempted to try to set a rough version of the site using a wiki or cms and see how it evolves. The big problem that I can see is how to handle disputes. I can imagine at least 3:

• someone claims a bounty but there is a dispute about whether it is completed
• someone pledges, concedes that the task has been completed, but then fails to pay
• two or more people claim the bounty for different solutions

Here are the rules that Nat used for the bounty scheme that he organised.