[LAU] How can we convert money to fixing bugs in software?

[renato]

Hi, I was wondering, what can we non-dev users do when our favorite
piece of FOSS software is lacking a little feature, but one that makes
the software for us of little or no use?

I'm thinking of seq24 not working, since a year or so, with JACK
Transport - which for an app like seq24 makes it almost useless. It
really itches me and I'd like to do what's in my power to help fix it.

I was thinking, since this would be (I think) a few hours of devs
work, couldn't I/we raise some money to pay a dev to do it? How would
I/we do it?

In long term thinking, we could have a site where users propose a bug,
devs name a price for it, and when the money raising reaches that
quantity, the dev starts to work on it and when he fixes it he recieves
the money. Basically a mix of kickstarter and amazon's mechanical turk.

I think this could work quite well for such bugs, which often appear in
awesome but semi-abandoned software (freewheeling and kluppe for
example come to [my] mind). I totally get that the original devs may
have lost interest and moved on in life, but being FOSS, the code is
there and maybe a few paid hours of a dev could get it working/add a
basic feature you really need.

Thoughts? 

renato 
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