BountySource is a collaborative project management service for use by any open-source software

Open-source software

Open-source software is computer software that is available in source code form: the source code and certain other rights normally reserved for copyright holders are provided under a software license that permits users to study, change, improve and at times also to distribute the software.Open...

 with an OSI

Open Source Initiative

The Open Source Initiative is an organization dedicated to promoting open source software.The organization was founded in February 1998, by Bruce Perens and Eric S. Raymond, prompted by Netscape Communications Corporation publishing the source code for its flagship Netscape Communicator product...

-approved license. Like other free services and products (SourceForge

SourceForge

SourceForge Enterprise Edition is a collaborative revision control and software development management system. It provides a front-end to a range of software development lifecycle services and integrates with a number of free software / open source software applications .While originally itself...

, trac

Trac

Trac is an open source, web-based project management and bug-tracking tool. The program is inspired by CVSTrac, and was originally named svntrac due to its ability to interface with Subversion. It is developed and maintained by Edgewall Software....

, bugzilla

Bugzilla

Bugzilla is a Web-based general-purpose bugtracker and testing tool originally developed and used by the Mozilla project, and licensed under the Mozilla Public License....

), BountySource allows for developers to track bugs and feature requests. Unlike the others, BountySource also allows for "bounties" and offers bounty integration as a focal point of its service. Development on BountySource was stopped in March 2008.

History

BountySource was started in late 2003 according to its domain registration data. The website was originally written in PHP

PHP

PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...

, but as of March 18, 2006 it switched to Ruby on Rails

Ruby on Rails

Ruby on Rails, often shortened to Rails or RoR, is an open source web application framework for the Ruby programming language.-History:...

.

Development on BountySource has been stopped in March 2008.

Bounty

Each bug report and feature request can have a monetary bounty placed on it from any number of users. The money acts as an incentive to the developers and also helps show the development team where users think the project needs more work. BountySource currently integrates directly with PayPal and holds the money in escrow prior to the bounty being placed, this resolves the issues that developers were having in the past where individuals would "pledge" money, but it was near impossible for a developer to collect.

Subversion (SVN) Hosting

BountySource offers Apache Subversion code repository to each project. On May 8, 2006 BountySource integrated a new custom-built SVN browser into the system.

Task Tracker

BountySource provides a custom-built task tracker. The tracker allows developers and project administrators to organize tasks into future release schedules, called roadmaps. Tasks can also be assigned to specific developers, as well as have bounties placed on them.

Content Management

The Content Management system currently uses textile

Textile (markup language)

Textile is a lightweight markup language originally developed by Dean Allen and billed as a "humane Web text generator". Textile converts its marked-up text input to valid, well-formed XHTML and also inserts character entity references for apostrophes, opening and closing single and double...

 markup language and a custom wiki-like system to allow for projects to have content displays as they see fit. Each project is given a subdomain on BountySource, http://PROJECT.bountysource.com/.

Open Source Releases

On May 11, 2006, BountySource released their SVN browser, titled bsSvnBrowser, under the GNU General Public License

GNU General Public License

The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....

.. They have announced their intentions to open source more portions of BountySource as time goes on and the code matures.

See also

• Comparison of free software hosting facilities
  Comparison of free software hosting facilities
  A source code repository or source code escrow is a file archive and web hosting facility where large amounts of source code are kept, either publicly or privately. They are often used by open source projects and other multi-developer projects to handle various versions and developers submitting...
  
  
• SourceForge
  SourceForge
  SourceForge Enterprise Edition is a collaborative revision control and software development management system. It provides a front-end to a range of software development lifecycle services and integrates with a number of free software / open source software applications .While originally itself...
  
  
• Google Code
  Google Code
  Google Code is Google's site for developer tools, APIs and technical resources. The site contains documentation on using Google developer tools and APIs—including discussion groups and blogs for developers using Google's developer products....
  
  
• CodePlex