Have you guys/gals thought about using BountySource to get some of the bugs fixed? It seems to work well for ElementaryOS.
https://www.bountysource.com/teams/haiku-project
The BountySource team imported all the issues from our bugtracker, all what's needed is people to donate some money on specific issues.
That being said, this was discussed by some members of the development team, and the current funding approach (donations to Haiku, inc + contracts where the developer chooses what he wishes to work on) seems better suited to us.
So, remember that BountySource does not get you bugs fixed. It is just a way to reward one developer when they fix a particular bug (which they would have done eventually, anyway).
With small bounties (let's say €20 or around that), you are not nearly funding the time spent at a reasonable price, so it is just a small extra reward. With larger ones, there are several problems, such as what happens if one dev spends months working on a ticket in the hope of getting the bounty money, but ultimately fails and is left without pay for his hard work (which may involve fixing several other bugs that were on the way, for example) ; what happens if several people work together to close a ticket and one of them gets all the bounty money.
Maybe there are some bounty-hunters who will start solving tickets once there start to be some money on them, but I somehow doubt it. I would like to be proven wrong if it results in more people contributing to Haiku, however :)
I’d like to contribute. Is the bug tracker up to date with who is working on what so I don’t duplicate work? I’d like to grab some of the application bugs as I am familiar with the BeAPI.
On the bounty site, the search function doesn’t seem to want to work for me …
I would also contribute.
The bugtracker has an “owner” field which is automatically assigned when the ticket is created. This does not always mean the feature is actively being worked on, unless the ticket state is “in progress”.
The simplest thing to do is create an account on trac and add a comment announcing you are going to take a look in the appropriate ticket.