On Tue, 25 Feb 2003 06:17:31 +0900
Colin Sampaleanu <colinml1 / exis.com> wrote:

> 
> There is already a site which does this (it may be commercial). 
> Unfortunately I can not remember its name, but the basic idea is the 
> same, people post a description of code that needs to be written, and 
> other people can offer to do the jobs.

IIRC, the site you're thinking of was indeed commercial, and fairly quickly 
degenerated into a marketplace for large-scale consulting work requests
on infrastructure-level open-source code. A more reasonable model might
be to look at the various "Q & A" sites where you can ask a question, offer
a payment of a few dollars, and then choose from the answers provided to
select a "winner" for the payout. 

Alternately, there are a number of paid stock photography sites which work 
on a credit-based minipayment system, where you can upload any image 
or code snippet you think others will like, and anyone else who wishes to 
use it pays a few credits (usually equivalent to less than $1 US) for the
download. The original creator maintains the original copyright, but anyone
paying to download it gets a free-use license for just about anything but
direct resale.

This seems like the kind of thing that could integrate very nicely with a
CPAN-like archive of available libraries and scripts: where there isn't a
pre-existing module to do whatever function you're looking for, you can
simply post a "bounty" in that spot, and any interested developer can take
up the task to fill in the opening.

Just my 2^n cents,

Lennon Day-Reynolds
lennon / day-reynolds.com