Introduction

In Open Source, we learn, build, contribute, and grow together.

Beginner developers gain experience by contributing to open-source projects and experienced developers sharpen their skills, explore new technologies, and mentor junior developers.

In Open Source, we all work in every aspect, from contributing to coding tasks like bug fixes, or feature enhancements to non-coding tasks like documentation improvement.

And, if you’re an open-source lover, you know how amazing it feels when your PR gets merged. It's like being on top of the world! With all these fun and learnings we can add one more element to our open-source journey and that is Bounty

Yes, to make open-source more exciting, engaging, and rewarding Opire is here to add an extra layer of bounty to your open-source journey.

Opire is a bounty platform for software developers. That helps maintainers to improve their project quality, and community engagement, and contributors to earn bounties for their contributions.

Free Code, Costly Time: The Open Source Struggle

Open Source is great, but not always easy. It's free in terms of freedom, but it costs us time and effort! Many developers spend long hours fixing bugs, improving code, or reworking entire sections of projects.

As a developer, you might have worked hard on a project, unsure if your work would be accepted. Or if you're managing an open-source project, you're probably familiar with the constant number of requests, and bug reports from users. It's a lot of responsibility with little recognition, especially when your project is in the early stages.

One of the biggest issues in open source is finding a balance between passion projects and earning a living. We enjoy the work, but it doesn't pay the bills. For contributors, it is difficult to align open-source passion with financial needs.

Here Opire comes in to solve these challenges. Opire offers a way for your open-source contributions to be recognized and rewarded financially. With Opire, an open-source contribution could be more rewarding.

Are you interested in learning how Opire could turn your open-source work into a rewarding experience? Let's see how this platform is changing things for developers in open source.

Introducing Opire: Where Open Source Meets Opportunity 🤝🏼

Opire is a bounty platform that supports all open-source contributors by providing bounties for their valuable time and skills.

It also supports open-source maintainers in keeping the community active and helps grow organizations or open-source projects.

Opire has a clear objective: Anyone can make a living from open-source.

As a contributor, you'll receive a bounty for solving an issue and submitting a PR. As a maintainer, your project will grow with the trust of community members and attract contributors who are truly passionate about your project.

Opire allows you to not only create bounties but also provide tips. As a contributor, you might put in a lot of effort but still not resolve the issue. In such cases, the project maintainer can tip that contributor.

The best thing about Opire? 🧐

Opire does not compromise the simplicity and authenticity of open-source. It understands the importance of quality contributions. It's not like you can make a simple and easy grammatical contribution to a project and get a bounty.

By following the Code Of Conduct of Projects for PRs, Opire promotes quality contributions rather than bad and cheap code.

Now we know what Opire is. But does it only benefit contributors?

No, Opire also benefits maintainers. Let's look at the benefits for both maintainers and contributors.

Benefits for Project Maintainers

As a project owner or maintainers, we always want to grow our project with valuable contributions and engage community members. Using Opire benefits your project in several ways.

Increased Engagement: Encouraging people to help with your project by offering bounties can get more people involved and make the community stronger.
Gain Popularity: Bounties in your projects will attract developers interested in earning them, putting your project in the spotlight for skilled professionals.
Quality Improvement: Bounties motivate developers to produce high-quality code, and since anyone can create bounties, a collective effort will form. This shared contribution improves the codebase and boosts overall project stability.
Prioritize Issues: The core team can focus on what brings the most value and on their priorities and let the community participate in other tasks with bounties.
Payment Security and Transparency: Opire does not hold funds, the payment is only made when someone has claimed the bounty and solved the issue. This way you can be sure that Opire will not disappear and take the money (as happened with BountySource).

Benefits for Contributors

Opire benefits contributors because it gives developers a unique chance to contribute to open-source projects and get bounties for their efforts. One of the best things about Opire is that it does not charge contributors any fees from their earned bounties.

So, if there’s an issue with a bounty of $50 and you resolve that issue, then after successfully merging the PR, you will receive the full $50.

As a contributor, you do not need to pay anything to Opire. The graph below shows the metrics.

✅ The bounty creator sets a bounty of $50.
✅ The total becomes $55.
✅ After paying $50 to the contributor, $5 is left. From that, Stripe will take its fee, and Opire charges less than 5%, which is great.

You can check the metrics for various bounty amounts here.

Apart from that there are also several benefits:

✅ Good bounties for efforts: Developers can earn money for their contributions, which can be a great source of income.
✅ Opportunity to work on high-priority issues: Developers can gain valuable experience by working on challenging and important tasks.
✅ Visibility: Developers can get noticed and appreciated in the open-source community by showing their work and getting bounties.

There are some open-source companies that hire based on the open-source contributions of developers and with Opire, candidates can show their contributions and get hired easily.

Now we know several benefits of using Opire, whether we’re a contributor or a maintainer. So, let’s see how to use it.

Getting Started with Opire

Whether you are a project maintainer or a contributor, the steps are almost the same, and easy to follow to get started with Opire. Let's look at the steps for both:

Bounty Creator
Developer (Contributors)

Create Bounty

Let's first see the process of creating bounties. Who can create bounties? Bounties can be created by anyone, not just people from the same organization or community but also someone outside the organization who just found the project and wants to add value to that project, can create bounties.

As you can see here, there are multiple people who created a bounty for this particular issue.

How to create those bounties?

For bounty creators, Opire provides two ways to integrate the bounty system into your project:

Install a bot
Add bounties directly from your Opire Dashboard

The bot option is optional, and it's entirely up to you whether you want to install the bot and integrate the bounty system. The second way is by using the Opire Dashboard. Both methods are easy, and we'll go through each one.

Create Bounties with Opire Bot

You can integrate the Opire Bot directly into your GitHub project, allowing you to interact with Opire on any issue or PR using just a few commands.

Go to this link to install Opire on GitHub.

You can go to this page and click on the Install in GitHub button.

After clicking, you’ll be redirected to a new page. If you’re associated with multiple organizations, it will ask which one you want to install the Opire Bot for.

Click on the organization you want to select

Now select which repositories you want to install it in. You can install it in all your repositories. Click on the All Repositories option and click on the Install.

If you want to install in some selected repositories, choose the second option, select repositories, and click on the install button to install Opire Bot in those repositories.

Now it’s installed in your organization, you can use Opire Bot’s commands in your issues or PRs to create or give bounties. Opire Bot provides multiple commands like:

Create Bounty: This command is used to create bounties. You can use it when creating an issue, in the issue's description, or by adding a comment to an issue. ☛ Command: /reward [amount] ☛ Example: /reward 20

Note: the amount will always be in dollars. Here 20 means $20*

Try: The second command is try. This command is optional but you should use this command when you're going to start working on that particular issue. This command indicates that you are going to try to solve the issue to claim a bounty. If you are not the first one, Opire will show you the list of developers who are also trying. This command is used when creating a comment on an issue.
☛ Command: /try
☛ Example: /try
Claim Bounty: This command is used for claiming bounties. After using the /try command, you’ll start working on that issue. Once you are ready to raise a PR, you can use this command in the PR description or in a comment on that PR.
☛ Command: /claim #[issue number]
☛ Example: /claim #84
Tip: This command is used when you want to give a tip to a contributor for their efforts. This command can be used when creating a comment on a PR/issue and in the same description of the PR/issue when creating it.
☛ Command: /tip [amount] @[user]
☛ Example: /tip #84 @jondoe

NOTE: All commands will only work when creating a new issue or PR description or adding a new comment. The commands will not work if you edit the description or comment.

Create Bounties without Opire Bot

The Opire bot is simple to install, but if the project doesn’t have the bot installed or you’re not associated with that organization or a project, you can still create bounties directly from Opire’s dashboard.

Click on this link and you'll be redirected to Opire’s dashboard.

You’ll see a list of projects with bounties and other options. Click on the Login button to log into the Opire dashboard.

After logging in, you’ll see your dashboard with multiple options like Rewards, Projects, etc.

Click on the My Dashboard dropdown and then click on Creator and then Rewards. Here you can create bounties for your projects.

When you click on the Create a new reward button, a modal will appear. Here, you need to add the issue URL for which you want to create a bounty and specify the amount. That's it. Clicking on the Create button will now generate a bounty for that issue.

Your bounty has been created, so now if you’re a contributor then how do you claim it? Let’s see the steps below.

Claim Bounty

The bounty creator creates a bounty, and the contributor claims it. To claim a bounty, you need to complete the issue. When you are assigned a bounty issue, complete it, raise a PR, and once your PR is merged, the bounty creator will pay you.

To claim a bounty, first log in to the Opire dashboard. Go to this link and log in to Opire with your GitHub account.

To receive payments through Opire, you need to connect your Stripe account with Opire. Go to the settings and click on the Connect Stripe button.

A modal will open where you enter your payment email and country.

Here is the list of all the supported countries

Once your account is connected to Stripe, you can find bounty issues and try to solve them. You can visit Opire’s homepage to search for issues directly from there.

Once you have the solution to the issue, create a PR and use Opire bot commands or a dashboard to claim the associated bounty.

In case you want to claim your bounty manually, you can claim that too from your dashboard. Go to the Programmer Rewards section in your dashboard and click on the Claim Rewards manually.

Enter the issue you worked on and the PR you have submitted. Once confirmed, it will notify the bounty creator, and they will pay you your bounty.

If multiple people create bounties for the same issue, each creator will only have to pay for the amount they offered. They won't have to pay the full total of all the bounty.

Pay Bounty

When a contributor claims a bounty, the creator is responsible for making the payment. To pay a bounty, go to a Creator Dashboard. Here you’ll see a list of all the bounties that you need to pay to contributors. Click on the Pay button to pay the bounty to the contributor.

You’ll pay through Stripe. Everything is connected to a stripe, so your payment will be securely sent to your contributor's account within 1-7 business days.

And that’s it. Claiming and creating a bounty is done. You can Checkout the Docs for more information. Now, let’s see some projects that are using Opire and rewarding their contributors.

Real-World Projects Using Opire

Many projects use Opire to set bounties for their issues. You can always check your Opire dashboard to see a list of these projects. Here are a few projects that are using Opire:

One example is the bounty created for the repo named restfuncs, Here, you can see everything is mentioned, such as:

✅ Whether a bot is available in that repo
✅ The language associated with the issue (TypeScript in this case)
✅ Bounty amount
✅ Share option. You can share this bounty with your friends or community.
✅ or If you want to add more bounty to this issue, you can click on the Add reward button to add more bounty to it.

Everything is easy to access and use. Besides that, there are several well-known projects on Opire like:

⚡️ Appwrite
⚡️ Three.JS
⚡️ Angular
⚡️ Vercel
⚡️ Keycloak, etc.

Projects also show if the bounty is claimed or not.

For example, this issue was created 21 days ago, and 2 days ago, a contributor resolved the issue and claimed the bounty.

Team Opire Supported me for writing this article, but they did not influence the content of this write-up.

Conclusion

Open Source is great in itself and Opire adds a new layer of "Bounty" to it. While maintaining the authenticity, and cleanliness of open source, Opire brings an approach that helps contributors and maintainers. By offering bounties for contributions, Opire encourages developers to tackle important issues and build stronger, and more active communities.

If you're a project maintainer who wants to bring talented developers and speed up development, or a developer looking to earn bounties while making a positive impact, Opire is the perfect solution.

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