For a person finding bugs for a living, an up-front fee to have their report reviewed by a maintainer would amount to an investment towards receiving a bug bounty if their report is valid and valuable. Just the cost of doing business.

It would discourage drive-by reports by people who just happened to notice a bug and want to let the maintainers know, but I think for a project that's high-profile enough to be flooded by bogus bug reports, bugs that random users just happen to notice will probably also get found by professional bug hunters at some point.

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bluGill 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Only if the system is fair. If I as a maintainer want to scam I can just close the report as invalid, collect the $$$. Then a week latter I fix the issue with a commit that looks like it is unrelated.

I wouldn't do the above, but it is easy to see how I could run that scam.

	▲	yorwba 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You can look at how the maintainer dealt with previous bug reports to decide whether you can trust them or not. If there haven't been any previous bug reports but they nonetheless ask for a fee to help deal with the large volume of bug reports, yeah, that might be a scam. If you're running their software, maybe also check whether it's full of malware.