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A 'bounty' (Latin: ''bonitās,'' goodness) is often offered by a group as an incentive for the accomplishment of a task by someone usually not associated with the group. Bounties are most commonly issued for the capture or retrieval of a person or thing. They are typically in the form of money. Two modern examples of bounties are the bounty placed for the capture of Saddam Hussein and his sons by the United States^[1] and Microsoft's bounty for computer virus creators^[2] Those who make a living by pursuing bounties are known as bounty hunters.

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Historical examples

Recent examples

See also

Notes

Historical examples

A Bounty System was used in the American Civil War. It was an incentive to increase enlistments. Another bounty system was used in New South Wales to increase the number of immigrants from 1832.^[3] Bounties were sometimes paid as rewards for killing Native Americans. In 1862, a farmer received a $500 bounty for shooting Taoyateduta (Little Crow). In 1856 Governor Isaac Stevens put a bounty on the head of Indians from Eastern Washington, $20 for ordinary Indians and $80 for a "chief". A Western Washington Indian, Patkanim, chief of the Snohomish, obligingly provided a great many heads, until the Territorial Auditor put a stop to the practice due to the dubious origins of the deceased.

Recent examples

Bounty hunters provided most of the prisoners held in Guantánamo Bay detainment camp.^[4]
The term ''bounty'' is used in the mathematics, computer science, and free culture communities to refer to a reward offered to any person willing to take on an open problem in that domain; for instance, implementing a feature in an open source software program.^[5][6] Bounties are offered for solving a particular math problem — ranging from small lemmas that graduate students solve in their spare time for $20 US up to some of the world's hardest math problems.^[7] Erdos was famous for offering mathematical bounties.^[8] Bounties have been paid by the for writing ''Wikipedia'' articles.

See also

★ Bounty hunter

Notes

1. Saddam bounty may go unclaimed
2. Cheat Sheet: Microsoft's virus bounty .
3. Immigration
4. Gitmo interrogations spark battle over tactics Dedman, Bill
5. Offering a bounty for security bugs
6. Mozilla Foundation Announces Security Bug Bounty Program
7. Math Bounties
8.