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In general I think the idea of "paypal donating" to a project is useful and may allow people to work full time on FOSS instead of part-timing it with a regular job. However this should be kept separate from the priorities of the developers and the user community. That is a pretty fundamental aspect of FOSS IMHO.

After some thought i voted +1 for this one. The reasons are:

- More developers would come to KDE
- The problem of bad code is not a problem if patches are not approved
- Bugs with more votes will get higher bounties, so the bugs that bug the most people will get fixed.
- Bugs that businesses have that are not common will also be fixed(they can pay high bounties)
- KDE might attract more corporate users because they can now dish out money to get bugs fixed. More users = good. These corporations might later to decide to donate to the project as a whole.
- It wouldn't hurt to try it. If it is a complete failure you can remove the feature.

So in summation: More users, more developers, less bugs and more stable software.

The thing is, there are already a lot of companies contributing code to various Linux projects - and hiring paid staff to do it, too. What's to stop a company hiring paid developers to work on KDE? Nothing, since I think this already happens. There's plenty of opportunity to make money out of open-source software, but money isn't - and almost definitely shouldn't be - the deciding factor, or even *a* deciding factor.

Actually, I think that bounties for solving bugs could be a good thing.

If for example I offer a couple of euros to solve a bug, I'll feel more involved with the community and the project, even if I can't code. I can see that my small contribute make my favourite app a little better, and I'm more motivated using and contributing KDE software.

And maybe hundreds of people will offer some money, so the actual bounty could be sufficient to boost the motivation of some devs.
It's nice to know that there's people out there that will be happy to thank you for your work with a small donation. Everybody win.

Sure, companies already contribute with money, hiring people or putting people working on something they need and companied may not want to spend money on that small annoying bug, just because they don't feel it strategic for them. They usually give single, big, contribues, isn't it?

But users have different needs and feelings, and they may really want to get that small, annoying bug resolved. And even if they won't give big donations, there are A LOT of users out there that may give a lot of small donations.