Proposal: Bug-Bounties for successful bug fixing

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The situation: I notice that there are bugs on FP (OpenOS) like the “clock resets after reboot” bug that in my opinion do not get the priority or attention they deserve. I do not want to go into a rant about the FP devs here, but I have to say that I am disappointed.
On the other hand I see people spending a lot of volunteer time specially in this forum to support the Fairphone. This is great, I like to contribute myself, but as an IT professional my time for work without remuneration is limited - specially if the work is for a company that is at its core commercial (Just to clarify: I do not say that “commercial” is a bad thing!)

My proposal: I want to suggest a “bug bounty” system to support the Fairphone devs AND to acknowledge the work of “outsiders” like myself. I want to see bugs fixed ASAP, happy devs and happy people in the forum!
The bounty must not be money - it could be credits for the shop or spare parts (to acknowledge how hard our FPs are being used :slight_smile:).

I am interested to see what others think about this.

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EDIT: @Roboe’s post below perfectly explains what I was trying to say.

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They have a Gerrit instance at code.fairphone.com, in fact, which should suffice (I think someone uploaded a patch for UnifiedNLP/microG to work on FP Open and they merged it).

But the conflict came mainly from their worlflow:

  • They are not using an “open development model”. They do not have a public bugtracker, for example.
  • Their main FP OS flavour is the GMS flavour, not the Open one. This means they develop on the GMS flavour and later port that changes for the Open (thus we don’t have the principal codebase to work on top of). The other way around is complicated.
  • Their manpower seems to be limited; they are a startup, after all. An open develoment requires time to review external collaborations.
  • A continuous integration system may come in handy for basic checks on contributions. But a complete Operating System CI system equals to money.
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That’s sad… I think Fairphone could really gain from using Github and creating a community of trusted volunteer developers in order to deport to them the code review and the development of the Open OS which can be costy internally… Those volunteer could be trusted based on meritocracy, creating a virtuous circle…

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A request for comments regarding a bugtracker has been opened here and we’d be happy to hear your feedback:

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