Since the very beginning of Orama, when it was called Lyra, we have wanted to approach its development through a transparent, open, and welcoming development process.

In the last year, almost 50 individuals have contributed to developing non-trivial software - a full-text search engine, and we couldn’t be more proud of that!

After announcing that the OramaSearch Inc. company was born, we started investing more efforts into making Orama faster, better, and easier to adopt.

We developed many new features - such as grouping, sorting, better stemming, and stop-words support - always keeping it open and easily accessible to everyone.

The birth of Orama wouldn’t have been possible if open-source software hadn’t existed. I think that’s pretty obvious! But open-source needs to be sustainable, and many ways exist to make it possible.

Sponsoring Open-Source Projects

Many great companies sponsor big open-source projects via various donation platforms such as GitHub Sponsors and Open Collective.

This approach ensures that significant projects in the open-source space would have enough funding to let part-time and full-time maintainers work on them without worrying about paying their bills. That’s a fantastic way of sustaining open-source software development, as everyone wins. Maintainers have a good source of income, sponsors know that the project will live, and the community can count on bug fixes, new features, better tutorials, and much more.

Orama Bounty Program

Another way of sustaining open-source projects is by allowing people to get more involved in a project, allowing them to gain expertise and experience on real-world challenges that come with complex software such as Orama.

We believe that even in open-source projects, both one-time and serial contributors should be rewarded for their efforts in helping evolve or fix the product.

For that reason, we’re happy to announce the Orama Open-Source Bounty Program, where we will grant bounties to anyone willing to contribute and help make Orama better.

We are partnering up with Algora, a beautiful bounty platform that allows contributors to redeem prizes in exchange for an open-source contribution. Algora is already used by some great companies and open-source projects, such as Nuxt, Zio, Cal.com, Trigger.dev, and more.

We have experimented with Algora and already granted more than $1,000 bounties in July 2023 only!

How to Participate

To participate in the Orama Open-Source Bounty Program, simply visit our GitHub repository and look for issues labeled with the ”bounty” tag. These issues will describe a specific task or feature that we need help with and a corresponding bounty amount that will be paid out upon successful completion.

To claim a bounty, follow these simple steps:

1. Claim the issue by commenting on it and letting us know that you want to work on it.

2. Fork the Orama repository and create a new branch for your changes.

3. Make the changes and submit a pull request.

4. Once your pull request has been reviewed and merged, we will award the bounty amount to you through Algora.

We hope that this program will encourage more people to get involved in the Orama project and help us make it even better!

Conclusion

We are excited to launch the Orama Open-Source Bounty Program and believe that it will help us build a stronger and more engaged community around our project. We hope that this initiative will encourage more people to get involved and contribute to the development of Orama, and we look forward to seeing the impact of this program in the months and years to come.

If you have any questions or feedback about the Orama Open-Source Bounty Program, please feel free to reach out to us on GitHub or via email. Thank you for being so supportive, and happy coding!