Bounty boosting at ROOL

Show ’em the money!

RISC OS Open Ltd, responsible for managing the RISC OS 5 source code, have announced another run of bounty matching for this month.

The bounty scheme was launched in 2011 as a way to allow members of the RISC OS community to contribute funds towards the development of certain aspects of RISC OS. A number of different bounties are listed on the RISC OS Open website, and people can send money to go towards whichever one(s) they see fit. The value of each bounty thus builds up and, hopefully, at some point developers will work on whatever that bounty covers and, when they have successfully completed the work, they will be able to claim the bounty and be rewarded, albeit in a small way, for their efforts.

Bounty matching means that RISC OS Open have pledged to match, pound for pound, all money donated to the bounty scheme during January, subject to a couple of limitations.

Firstly, not all of the bounties listed on their website qualify: The “RISC OS General” bounty, which is for contributing to the company itself, to help with the running costs and administration, and so on, is specifically excluded from the scheme. This, presumably, is because matching this bounty would be slightly nonsensical – the money to match bounties would be coming from the RISC OS Open pot, and matching the General bounty would therefore see the money being contributed to the RISC OS Open pot.

Secondly, there is an upper limit on the total amount available through the bounty matching scheme. When announced last week, the amount was £2,000 – but that has now been raised to £2,015 to match the year we have just entered.

The list of bounties has also just had two new ones added, recognising (according to Steve Revill) “that some of the popular things that people want may not be the major structural work that we’ve traditionally associated with bounties.” The two new bounties are to update JPEG support, and to add support for tinted filer window backgrounds.

The goal of the first of these is to have RISC OS support the latest JPEG formats via the JPEG_ SWIs, and will require that the SpriteExtend module (which provides those SWIs) be updated, as well as other JPEG related binaries.

The second is described as “a relatively simple bounty” and is to add support for tinted filer window backgrounds – something that, on the face of it, sounds more aesthetic than functional but, nonetheless, does have a functional benefit for the way users work with the system. The idea is to have the filer windows tinted in a way that is determined by their path, with the amount of tint increasing the further down a given path the filer window is. (So the further inside !Boot the user delves, for example, the filer windows might become increasingly red, indicating that the user is in an area where changes he or she makes could cause problems for the system.)

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