Bountysource

» see bountysource.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Warren Konkel and David Rappo tried this in 2003 and it went nowhere. The plan then was a whole home for open source, code hosting with bounties bolted onto the issue tracker, and they built a few months of it before jobs took over. Konkel became the first hire at LivingSocial. Rappo went off to produce Guitar Hero and Skylanders. The idea sat unused for nine years.

Bountysource came back in 2012 as the small version of itself. GitHub had an API by then, so the site could hang money directly on a real issue number: anyone could pledge to a bug or a feature request, the pledges pooled, and Bountysource held the pot until a maintainer merged the fix. A seed round of $1.1 million followed in July 2013. It was the first thing that made paying for open source feel like a normal transaction instead of a favor.

Every developer I know has an opinion about why open source funding does not work, and most of those opinions are about incentives. What actually broke here was simpler and more embarrassing than incentives.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how the escrow worked ~

Bountysource never touched the code. It held cash. You pledged through PayPal or in Bitcoin, the amount showed publicly against the issue, and when the work landed the claimant filed for the payout and waited on verification. Between the pledge and the payout the money was Bountysource's problem, sometimes for months, because merging a patch into a real project is not fast.

That gap is the entire product, and it is also the entire risk. A platform holding other people's money against work that has not finished yet is running a float, and a float only stays honest while the company underneath it is solvent.

~ the silence ~

The ownership had moved twice by then. The crypto company CanYa bought Bountysource in 2017. The Blockchain Group, a French firm, took it over with effect from 1 July 2020. Through early 2023 verified claims stopped being paid, and by the middle of that year nobody was answering support mail, GitHub issues, or anything else.

Developers did the accounting themselves, in public, on the platform's own bug tracker. An issue titled Bountysource is Insolvent went up and filled with people posting amounts. Evan Boehs collected the documented cases and put the confirmed total at more than $21,000 of work already delivered and never paid. The Blockchain Group filed for bankruptcy in November 2023. By May 2024 the site was showing a message saying it was temporarily down, and in 2026 the domain does not resolve at all.

~ what it cost the projects ~

NewPipe published a notice saying it had lost access to about six thousand euros of accumulated bounties. FreeCAD had $4,279.10 sitting on the platform. BorgBackup and elementary OS had balances of their own, and none of it was insured or recoverable, because escrow with no license behind it is a promise with a database attached.

The projects moved on to Open Collective and to GitHub Sponsors, both of which are structured so that the money reaches a fiscal host rather than parking inside a startup. That change is the real inheritance. Bountysource proved the demand was there and then demonstrated, at the expense of the people who trusted it, exactly which part of the design had to be somebody else's job.

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