Some ways that bug futures markets differ from open source bounties

11 September 2017

Question about A Trading Market for Prices in Peer Production: what's the difference between a futures market on software bugs and an open source bounty system connected to the issue tracker? In many simple cases a bug futures market will function in a similar way, but we predict that some qualities of the futures market will make it work differently.

Open source bounty systems have extra transaction costs of assigning credit for a fix.
Open source bounty systems can incentivize contention over who can submit a complete fix, when we want to be able to incentivize partial work and meta work.

Incentivizing partial work and meta work (such as bug triage) would be prohibitively expensive to manage using bounties claimed by individuals, where each claim must be accepted or rejected. The bug futures concept addresses this with radical simplicity: the owners of each side of the contract are tracked completely separately from the reporter and assignee of a bug in the bug tracker.

And bug futures contracts can be traded in advance of expiration. Any work that you do that meaningfully changes the probability of the bug getting fixed by the contract closing date can move the price.

You might choose to buy the "fixed" side of the contract, do some work that makes it look more fixable, sell at a higher price. A futures market might make it practical to do "day trading" of small steps, such as translating a bug report originally posted in a language that the developers don't know, helping a user submit a log file, or writing a failing test.

With the right market design, participants in a bug futures market have the incentive to talk their books, by sharing partial work and metadata.