Open Source Projects – How to Maintain Quality

Bounties & Rewards

Many open source projects offer bounties for fixing certain bugs:

• Chromium's Vulnerability Reward Program (sponsored by Google, and expanded several times)
• Ubuntu (sponsored by Canonical) ^{(appears to be closed now)}

Others are sponsored by individual donations or 3rd-parties:

• The FOSS Factory

Open-Source Commercial and Non-Commercial Software Positions

Some open-source projects (open-source does not imply free software) are sponsored and managed and they have full-time employees working on these. These could include:

• RedHat (Linux, some Java-related development like GCJ contributions, past contributions from their members to known open-source projects for internal work, etc...)
• Sun/Oracle (OpenJDK, MySQL, and many related community projects)
• Google (many of their open-source libraries have full-time teams, Chromium, Android...)

While this may not why you originally had in mind, they are indeed open-source projects, and they do have people being paid to work on them.

Open source projects sometimes have intense streams of user feedback, and sometimes corporations would simply pay to make certain features planned and implemented (by hiring their own developers or the original developers).

If your project has 100 users, you probably can develop whatever is most fun to code.

If your project has 100k users, most probably you already have a list of pain points most users want fixed in the next release, and a list of top N features that users request in your issue tracker and keep asking about on forums.

With this feedback, you can write requirement documents for your core team, create roadmaps to help independent contributors understand your vision, and hope that some of the 100k users will send in patches.