The roads I take...

I've been thinking about this project for some time, and working on it behind the scenes for a few weeks now - finally it's ready to be announced publicly:

The KaiRo.at Bug Bounty Program is being launched today!

This program, launched by KaiRo.at - Robert Kaiser IT-Services, aims to "encourage developers to get involved with SeaMonkey by rewarding them with some hard dollars for contributing important code to the SeaMonkey project", as stated on the program's pages.

The program is currently awarding a total of 2700 USD to work on a list of 7 critical bugs/features on the path to SeaMonkey 2, including dynamic UA spoofing and feed reading, as well as download manager, Lightning integration, page info, plugin finder and browser notifications. That's the current set of bug bounties for 2007, there's still a slight possibility that KaiRo.at may even extend this program though as we see fit. Any developer completing the work as described on the program's pages is eligible for the bug bounty assigned to the specific task.

I hope those bug bounties will be an additional motivating factor for people to work on those features for SeaMonkey, but also hope they will continue to stay with the project after completing those immediate tasks.

And here's a short Q&A about this program, to sum it up once again:

• Who is KaiRo.at, what is their interest in this and where is this money coming from?
  OK, that's 3 question at once, but the answers cumulate for the most part: KaiRo.at - Robert Kaiser IT-Services is the one-man-business of me, SeaMonkey Council member Robert Kaiser. The money comes from my earnings through Google AdSense on the SeaMonkey German website - and as that income rises with SeaMonkey adoption in German-speaking countries and my business is mainly around SeaMonkey, my interest is in improving SeaMonkey so that more people will use it. Sounds too good to be true? Well, it isn't. It is the whole truth. Believe me.
• What tasks will be awarded with which amounts of money?
  Look at the bug bounty list for 2007 for which tasks are currently in the program, and the detail pages linked there for the amount and detailed description of the work to do there.
• Who will get the money?
  As stated on the main program page, the developer who implements the vast majority of the task described in the detailed per-bug work description page will be awarded with the sum stated in that latter page. If multiple developers worked on the task or something else out of the ordinary happens, the ultimate decision is up to KaiRo.at (Robert Kaiser).
• What is the motivation behind the program?
  What's driving this program is the idea of rewarding people for their work on important parts of SeaMonkey and to give an additional motivation for developers to implement the listed features. The money is earned through the community using SeaMonkey, it's only fair to give something back to those who work on improving this software.

With that, happy hacking on an improved and much better than ever SeaMonkey 2 codebase!