As edited by Joe: https://gist.github.com/josephj11/23639ecc8b18604fbebf369acb0a1a56
The AutoKey open-source project is exploring using the Opire development rewards ecosystem to attract ongoing development support. This is a mature project whose original developers have moved on. AutoKey needs developers who can maintain and enhance it. Historically, the project has had difficulty attracting attention from developers who can help address these needs. AutoKey is now exploring the use of the Opire ecosystem so AutoKey’s community of users can collaborate to offer rewards to developers.
AutoKey is a desktop automation tool for Linux. It allows users to define abbreviations and hotkeys that trigger various types of actions such as automatically typing out text or executing other desktop actions. AutoKey is written in Python, so it needs Python developers. All of the project’s code, information, and support resources are linked from its GitHub home page. AutoKey is packaged and delivered as part of most major Linux distributions.
AutoKey was originally developed for Linux as an X11-based utility to automate repetitive typing tasks and to control desktop applications running under X11. When a trigger phase is typed or a hotkey is pressed, a predefined phrase is emitted just as if it was being typed out on the keyboard. For more complex tasks, AutoKey allows the user to write Python scripts that can be used to automate more complex keyboard, mouse, and window manager actions. These scripts are tied to their own user-defined hotkeys and trigger phrases and are executed when those hotkeys or phases are used.
AutoKey is a mature project with a stable code base. The project has had difficulty recruiting Python developers. Currently, AutoKey needs to add support for Wayland. Users who migrate to Wayland-based desktops lose the ability to use AutoKey. For some users, this fact has been enough of a concern to prevent them from upgrading to the latest releases of their distributions. The AutoKey community sees this as an unacceptable state of affairs and is actively seeking a developer who could take on the task of finalizing Wayland support in AutoKey. Preliminary work has been done and help is needed completing and testing it.
Using the Opire development bounty rewards ecosystem, AutoKey hopes to attract developers who have the necessary skills and interest to help complete this work and continue development. Some members of the AutoKey community have already pledged rewards to any developer who can help.
A major feature of Opire is that it eliminates the need for projects to directly accept and disburse funds. This avoids having to form a corporate entity with all the associated regulatory and accounting overhead that small projects can't hope to address.
Using Opire’s web interface to offer rewards provides a way to offer rewards independently of any specific development repository (GitHub, SourceForge, etc.) and that’s what AutoKey has done.
AutoKey's GitHub administrators have recently taken the next step by installing Opire’s GitHub bot into the AutoKey project repository. This dramatically increases the visibility of the development rewards offered through Opire within the project’s GitHub. It also makes it much easier for community members to contribute to rewards and for developers to claim them when they contribute code to the project.
Based on previous experience using another development rewards system, the AutoKey project is encouraged by Opire’s methodology for paying out rewards. When using Opire’s system, reward payments flow directly from the person who made the offer to the developer who claims it. Opire only acts as a “market maker”, collecting a small fee for connecting the two parties. At no point does Opire hold the reward payment itself. In the past, the AutoKey community was burned when they tried to use an escrow-based development bounty system called BountySource. That service collected money from community members who wished to offer rewards, held it internally, and paid it out to developers who made code submissions that qualified for a reward. When BountySource subsequently went out of business, the reward money it held was lost. The AutoKey community members who had put up rewards were left out in the cold.
Opire is a platform for offering development bounties or rewards for open-source development work. Visit app.opire.dev to see the development rewards that are currently on offer. Register on the site to work on a project and collect a reward, or to offer rewards for your own projects.
The AutoKey community has just begun to offer rewards on Opire. If you are a developer who can help enhance AutoKey to run under Wayland, have a look at the reward offering for that work. You should notice that Opire contributed $20 from their funds to give that issue a small boost. What makes that even more impressive is that Opire isn’t funded so this money is coming directly from the founders’ pockets.
If you manage a project on GitHub and want to enable your community to offer and collect rewards from within the GitHub interface itself then you should consider installing Opire’s GitHub bot. Once installed your users will be able to use simple GitHub macros to offer and collect rewards:
/reward [amount] – create a reward for an issue in the project’s issue tracker
/try – try to solve an issue
/claim #[issue_number] – claim a reward for an issue
/tip [amount] @[user] – give the specified GitHub user a tip (in USD)
Like AutoKey, many open-source projects struggle to find the resources they need. Here at Opire, it’s our mission to help projects like AutoKey attract the resources they need to thrive. We wish them all the best.
Thanks. This is getting better. Some feedback:
We are a desktop automation project, not keyboard automation because we support mouse and window operations and whatever the user is capable of coding in Python scripts.
One of our developers, Sam, has returned and has pushed his Wayland PR into our develop branch. I haven't looked at it yet and I don't think anyone has tested it yet, but it probably means that the Opire bounty on that issue is spoken for and not available to new contributors.
The first image needs some explanation/caption because it appears to be about multiple projects using Opire, but may look like all those bounties are for AutoKey issues.
I am not very GitHub savvy, so I'm going to fork this Gist so I can suggest edits to it. If there is a better way to do this let me know. I didn't have time to polish this. It's just a suggested edit.
General question:
How does Opire work? There are more than one contributors to the current bounty. Does each contributor decide independently if their bounty should be paid? If so, the dev can't be sure how much they are going to get. How much negotiation/overhead comes into play if there are a lot of small donors to one issue that each have to be satisfied...?