What is the price of a bug?

Can a company pay people to discover bugs in their systems? This already exist for security issues where experts about security find security issues in browsers, OS or any other kind of programs but they won't freely give away their discovery as they spent a hard time on it. I think this is correct as the company will benefit from this.

As we are close to tag as final a major release of our Object Database (NeoDatis ODB), we would like to be able to do that : pay people to help us find bugs in our database engine.

Obviously we don't rely on this to guarantee the quality of the release: we strongly use unit tests. We currently have more that 700 junits.

So we decided to create a 'NeoDatis Zero Bug Campaign' in which we will pay 10$ for the first 10 bugs found on the current java release: 1.9 RC4.

read http://www.neodatis.org/1-9-zero-bug-campaign for more information!

NeoDatis, Google & Db4O

Last week I got an email from a Neodatis user, he was concerned and asked me if DB4O had acquired NeoDatis, because he was googling the NeoDatis name(a fast way to reach the NeoDatis site) and suddenly he came across with a DB40 link on the sponsored area. In a first glance I didn't believe it,

so I decided to try it by myself. Guess what appeared in the sponsored link area ? Db4O.

First thought: There is a bug in google adword display algorithm, as the keywords must be the same they displayed Db4O ad instead on NeoDatis.

But looking better at the ad (below) you can see that the title of the ad is NeoDatis but the link is to the Db4O site! For me it was weird, to see as an open source(as they claim to be) project like Db4O

use these kind of stategy to fool the community. Even they consider NeoDatis ODB as a real threat, I just want to develop ODB, and I never though to use an ad strategy like that before.

(Updated: 03/07/2009 : It seems Db4o deactivated the adwords campaign, probably after checking this blog)

This kind of event raises some interesting questions:

- Such commercial strategy is interesting for the open source community?

- Is this legal to do this? Can Db4O ask Google to display an ad with the name of a concurrent open source project linking its own site?

Any thought about this?