Should Microsoft Offer Bounties for Discovering Windows Bugs?

[Tharic-Nar]

The idea of offering bounties for discovering bugs might sound a bit odd to some, but it's not that uncommon. Both Google and Mozilla have been offering up cash to those who find both serious and mild bugs in their respective browsers, and for the most part, it seems like the idea has been a success thus far. No surprise - what code junkie wouldn't mind earning some extra cash while digging through C++?

You can read the rest of our post and discuss here.

 

[Doomsday]

i wants $1,000,000 for a bug!

 

[OriginalJoeCool]

I think they should release the source code under the GPL and let us have at it! The OS'd be patched in a few days!

 

[Optix]

Sounds like Microsoft is trying to save some cash by downsizing their testing staff and putting the work on people who try to break things for fun.

 

[OriginalJoeCool]

I still marvel at how they were able to pull off a failure as massive as Vista.

 

[Optix]

Coke, New Coke.

Another instance of a gigantic cock up that was handled by a company with a ton of cash. Anything is possible when you have the bank.

 

[OriginalJoeCool]

For sure. But you'd think they would have noticed how much it ... sucked.

 

[Kougar]

Sounds like Microsoft is trying to save some cash by downsizing their testing staff and putting the work on people who try to break things for fun.

It doesn't just save them cash, it was proven to be a more effective means to discover bugs. Microsoft credited that very thing with how polished Windows 7 was (versus Vista) in part to the longer and more open beta stages Many of which were run concurrently, were semi-public and tied into the Microsoft Connect system for bug reporting/Q&A.

The only real issue I see is figuring out how to scale it up without getting clogged with miscellaneous reports, or false bug reports, and so on burying the real issues. Engineers can't write or fix code if they're busy wading through tons of useless reports to find 'em!