Rewarding Open Source Developers – How can we help?
WebKit, an open source library built on top of KDE’s KHTML is the foundation for Apple’s Safari, their Dashboard and a bunch of other stuff. Less than a year after taking the project open source, Apple is giving MacBook Pros and a trip to AWWDC’06 to the top 12 project contributors. The announcement is here.
I did a few quick searches to see who else is doing this kind of thing (large companies rewarding open source dev) – it’s happened before, but not often enough. Sansblog talks about why that is (probably). It’s hard to reward a group of people without upsetting the people who were passed over.
tibike77 on slashdot reminds us that we can all reward the open source community through paypal donation links. We can also contribute to bounties to pay for work that hasn’t been completed, yet, as an incentive. There is no good index of community funded bounties, but there is an index of company funded bounties here.
John Tokash 
To find community bounties, you might want to start your search with Google’s summer of code projects – most major open source projects that recieved Google’s summer of code bounties also have bounties for non-summer of code projects, and the summer of code links there.
I know that both KDE and GNOME have their own bounty systems. GNOME bounty system can be found here: http://www.gnome.org/bounties/index.html
We aren’t a large company but we are trying to promote and give back to programmers with a coding competition for an open source project we just released, Shine Live Help.
We’ve also discussed bounties, but decided to do a contest first and see how that goes.
If you want more info you can go to http://www.iradeon.com/codeprix.html