Thanks a lot for the replies so far.
First of all, let me clarify one point: the company does not intend to build a business model on top of CHDK. We already use cameras of all sorts for several things, and CHDK has been considered as an interesting tool for one of our current R&D projects; the project would still work without CHDK, but would be a little more cumbersome. We are still deciding whether to use CHDK or not. Either way, we thought that we could help CHDK in some way, which is why I posted this RFC.
We are also aware that CHDK is an open source project, the meaning of H, that is not indorsed by Canon, that it may suddenly not work anymore with newer cameras etc. In fact these are some of the reasons why we thought that a bounty could be a good idea instead of hiring. I have worked in and with open source projects for over a decade, and have seen offers for bounties (that is, "implement that and we'll pay some money") and of hiring ("we know you can do that. We need that. Implement for us, get paid"). Bounties usually are interesting (but often too cheap), and hiring usually means that nothing gets back to the open source community.
I'll reply to some specific points below, but here's another question then: do you have any other proposals that would be helpful to CHDK?
i think you can safely choose between the already ported cameras.
We know. But reading the forum we noticed that there are many requests when new cameras come out and ports may take a while. We also thought that we should give something back instead of just using CHDK (see next one) and to speed things up a bit.
Most of those 'giants' are no longer around and were assisted by countless other individuals.
My opinion on this is that you should view this from a different perspective: you see a port for a specific camera has been made by user X and you (can) show your appreciation with a donation or something.
Indeed. Some projects are large enough to spawn a company (for profit or non profit) that accepts donations. Others are so small that they have only one or two developers. CHDK is neither. I couldn't find anything in the wiki about donations, and like Microfunguy wrote, it would be difficult to find a way to give back to everybody who once helped. A bounty looks into the future, so it's more manageable.
Payment imposes obligations of support.
Not really. This is why we thought of a bounty: once it "works" (according to some definition what works, like a specification of a minimum feature set) the bounty is complete and there will be no support afterwards.
However, the flip side of the offer of a bounty is that so far, almost nobody has done their first original port of a new camera without significant help from the members of this forum. Will the same help be freely offered once people are competing for a bounty and thus paid for their effort ? Or will the some of the eight to ten people (my rough estimate) who currently really understand the porting process (and have ported more than one camera) just walk away ?
This could be a problem. But the bounty can be broken in many stages. The bounty may also be split among all commiters, or commiters that did at least N% of the port etc.
If you want to actually hire someone, just, well, hire him/her (?)
If you believe that this is a good solution, we're open to that. Would it generate interest? Someone working part-time or full-time on this project.
