Add a marketplace with all the funded issues

[AntoineKM]

For developers wishing to find funded issues, it would be great to have a page listing all those that are funded.

[birkjernstrom]

Apologies @AntoineKM for the delay. Appreciate the feature request (moved it to discussions).

Unfortunately, I don't think we're going to invest in this anytime soon. Our mission is to build the best platform for developers to get more funding and paid (commercial offerings) coding on their passions. So for the open source ecosystem our focus is the maintainers and core contributors. Increasing ways for them to get funding and share it with contributors who are invested in the community.

A marketplace for funded issues (bounties) comes with a lot of challenges that could, and historically has, worked against the best interest for maintainers.

• Creating a race condition of contributors who 1) are only interested in the capital 2) often submit lower quality contributions as a result
• Bounties submitted by anyone without maintainer consent or encouragement. Since the issue/request has not been raised organically and "approved" by the maintainer it runs a high risk of getting denied – causing friction for everyone involved unnecessarily.

That's why we often stay clear from the term Bounty since it has negative associations within the ecosystem and why we've designed and built issue funding & contributor rewards with Polar to be different. You can read more about this here: https://polar.sh/polarsource/posts/introducing-rewards

However, having said all this, I'm not ruling it out for the future. As with all problems, they are solvable with enough time, care and effort invested into them. I have a lot of ideas of how to build a different type of marketplace that could solve them. But, I doubt it would increase the amount of funding that goes to the initiatives and developers themselves behind these initiatives (our focus) and those users have not requested us to invest more into it. Therefore, it currently has a low priority within our team and focus with Polar.

[koisose]

ah i see, thanks for the explanation, i also think the same thing, i think if there is an explorer of people who need to get funded or issues that need to be funded would be easier to see new things, i also saw polar because of ladybirdbrowser, but there is no mention of ladybird issues in the polar website, looking forward in the future, i really like the design and the mission of polar actually, making it opensource give it people more options, instead of something like algora, kinda like coolify give options to opensource or deploy it from coolify website itself

[pktiuk]

Maybe listing in marketplace should be an opt-in feature for maintainers which decided to look for contributors from outside.

I think Polar just shouldn't impose this way of work on maintainers, but instead let them choose.

[birkjernstrom]

Yes, that's how I thought of it too @pktiuk when I've been thinking of it. However, there is a lot more to it and building a marketplace vs. platform are two separate beasts. For a small team focus is key and I'm afraid we've decided not to pursue the marketplace approach in the coming year(s) and focus exclusively on building the best monetization platform for developers – it's where we get most feature requests, interest & demand from developers at the moment.

[pktiuk]

For a small team focus is key and I'm afraid we've decided not to pursue the marketplace approach

I like this answer more than just saying that marketplaces are bad.

focus exclusively on building the best monetization platform for developers

In this case I just ask you to at least address some basic requests from developers willing to somehow promote their issues with rewards. For example by giving them option to mark these issues with special label on GitHub (like I proposed in a discord discussion)

[AntoineKM]

Thank you for the thoughtful responses. I understand the challenges with creating a marketplace, but I believe offering an opt-in feature for maintainers could strike a balance. This would not only help developers discover funded issues but also attract companies with open-source projects. These companies might be interested in bringing their funded issues to the foreground, helping them gain visibility and attract more contributors. This could foster collaboration, drive more funding, and ultimately benefit both developers and maintainers.

[AntoineKM]

I've found that using the search query site:polar.sh inurl:/issues/ on Google is a temporary workaround for developers trying to find available funded issues. While it's not a perfect solution, it can help us navigate what's out there.

[birkjernstrom]

@AntoineKM

Thank you for the thoughtful responses. I understand the challenges with creating a marketplace, but I believe offering an opt-in feature for maintainers could strike a balance. This would not only help developers discover funded issues but also attract companies with open-source projects. These companies might be interested in bringing their funded issues to the foreground, helping them gain visibility and attract more contributors. This could foster collaboration, drive more funding, and ultimately benefit both developers and maintainers.

Yes, it's definitely solvable, but I'm afraid it's not our focus and a direction we're taking Polar in. For bounties of this type, I would rather recommend a service such as Algora.io focused on it.