I agree; and nothing socialist about that: Either you fund for-profit projects and you get a share of the profit, or you fund free software and get the code.

The second is more useful for the bitcoin community right now. I really want to aim it at improving bitcoin-related open source projects.
Sure! Python for web is quite easy to learn, if you already know Python (especially advanced stuff like you did) that's the most important part.

My ideas:

• People can post a new bounty, or add to an existing one (all in escrow, of course, to make sure payouts happen).
• For each bounty there needs to be a (or more) "moderators" that decide if the bounty can be claimed, or that rework still needs to be done. Moderators should be developers, so that code quality is also looked at.
• A developer that has done some work on a bounty can post his initial work to prove that he is working on it; it might be that this still requires rework, but moderators can "lock" the bounty in his name so no one else can claim it in the meantime.
• Each bounty must have a "due date", by which the posters get back their escrowed money if there is no initial submission by then
• They system should have a (primitive) discussion thread on each bounty to discuss requirements etc.
• Registration / authentication simply using OpenID

Maybe we should ask for this topic to be moved to Project Development?