The great thing about Gnomedex is that everyone there, aside from yours truly, is famous. Maybe famous in a moderate, local-boy-done-good kind-of way, but famous nonetheless. Take, for example, the man seated at my right - Andrew McCaskey, the editor of SlashdotReview. Not only is his daily podcast heard by thousands, but he was the first man from the conference to really grab ahold of the concept of BountyUp, and do something cool with it.

In this case, the coolness is the Watercone - a simple solar still intended for the developing world. (I found out over the course of the weekend that Andrew is active with the Rotary Club, and has a passion for international social causes, particularly in health.) Check out the bounty that he opened up.

When you set off on a grand adventure of entrepreneurship, there are a few milestones you’ve got in mind:

• Your first focus group
• The “beta” launch
• First revenue
• Profitability (!)

There is an easy tendency to imagine this as a steep hill, that gradually levels off as you approach the top. ‘Surely,’ you think, ‘It must be simple to get to profitability once you’ve got revenue, right?’ Not so much. (more…)

Ah, the code bounty - that staple of open-source software development, where noble-minded and well-informed users donate their hard-earned cash to support building the features they crave the most.

And yet, for such a universally-espoused idea, there are very few of them actually going on. Why?

Software bounties are nothing new - Novell sponsored a large set of them on the Gnome linux desktop, Drupal-man(n)-extraordinare Boris Mann pioneered “reverse bounties” for drupal features, and they’re a staple of development on the Asterisk open-source PBX. But there are some challenges with how they’ve (historically) been managed… (more…)