[Advocacy] Bounties

[Joshua Root]

I have been hearing rumblings in the Mac community lately about the 
poor support for Ogg/Vorbis in OS X. For many, the last straw came 
when the qtoggvorbis component, which had been the only way to play 
Vorbis in iTunes, stopped working under the newly-released QuickTime 
7. Worse, the project's admins have apparently been unreachable for a 
year now.

I have heard several people express their interest in the proposed 
bounty, mentioned on the Xiph wiki, for the creation of a Xiph 
QuickTime component which would support Ogg and all the Xiph codecs.

They also had some concerns, however: the bounty has not been 
officially offered yet, and its value is unknown. It isn't being 
publicized, so there is the possibility that it may not be claimed on 
a convenient time scale. Some perceived the bounty as being too big a 
job: perhaps it could be broken up into a few smaller milestones, 
each with their own reward?

Nonetheless, a few have in fact donated money to Xiph with a request 
that it be put toward the QuickTime component bounty.

In light of all this, I think that now is a very good time to 
announce the bounty officially, put in a suitable amount of money 
from the foundation, and actively solicit donations. From what I've 
seen, there are a nontrivial number of Mac users who would really 
like somebody to fix this problem.

Cheers,
Josh