In the line of worst case scenario that seems to permeate today's world, GitHub can now become a tool for money laundering. All you need is a few scripts creating puppet users and repos, and automate shill commits and pull requests.
BitHub = Bitcoin + GitHub. An experiment in funding privacy OSS
11–20 of 53 posts
Re: BitHub = Bitcoin + GitHub. An experiment in funding privacy OSS
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hadn't thought about this... but honestly a simple solution would be to let the repo maintainer decide how much to give for each commit in a scale of importance. You can't obviously measure it on number of lines changed or something because that doesn't reflect the importance of a change, but maybe just say "okay, I can merge this but you get only 0.0001% because it's just a minor typo" or something like that. And…
Doesn't fix the problem. Actually makes it harder: I shouldn't have this level of management forced on me. Perhaps the repo owner (or whoever manages pull requests) should receive an amount? Obviously this could be abused too.
What do you mean? You are the repo owner and you set up issues with a specific value, then whoever submits a pull request (merged) for those issues automatically gets paid.
Or maybe I didn't properly understand how it works?
Re: BitHub = Bitcoin + GitHub. An experiment in funding privacy OSS
#13I think this is genius. Call me naive but this is a really nice idea. Reminds me of flattr except it's automated. The idea of having bounties to various project issues and setting up a commit/pull-request payout could be a real incentive for a lot of people to contribute to actual open source software. Bitcoin is just the icing, makes this really well integrated and anonymous too. I can't wait to see where this proje…
One thing I see as a problem here is that anonymity enforces very careful code reviews focusing on security imlications of the changes.
Re: BitHub = Bitcoin + GitHub. An experiment in funding privacy OSS
#14My gut instinct was "this is perfect". However, sferik says it's made maintaining his repo much, much harder: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6882374 (SFErik had nothing to do with the bitcoin stuff; someone else put up the money and started it for his repo.)
Our hypothesis with this project is that any commit, even a "fluff commit," is better than no commit, and that the overhead of trying to build a more complex accounting model is higher than the cost of paying out 2% for "fluff." Basically, worse is better.
But, we could be wrong! We'll see.
Re: BitHub = Bitcoin + GitHub. An experiment in funding privacy OSS
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't fix the problem. Actually makes it harder: I shouldn't have this level of management forced on me. Perhaps the repo owner (or whoever manages pull requests) should receive an amount? Obviously this could be abused too.
What do you mean? You are the repo owner and you set up issues with a specific value, then whoever submits a pull request (merged) for those issues automatically gets paid. Or maybe I didn't properly understand how it works?
I was thinking more along of the lines of sferik's situation, where someone other than the repo owner funded the rewards. I certainly am not interested in paying anyone to improve any of my projects, but if any were valuable, a third party might.
Re: BitHub = Bitcoin + GitHub. An experiment in funding privacy OSS
#16My gut instinct was "this is perfect". However, sferik says it's made maintaining his repo much, much harder: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6882374 (SFErik had nothing to do with the bitcoin stuff; someone else put up the money and started it for his repo.)
Yeah, I think this has the intractable problem of effectively useless commits.
One might argue that initially those problems would fix themselves as people would grab for the lowly hanging fruit, and that's fine, but I could see someone refactoring segments of code for no realistic reason, but "selling" it as an improvement, for the explicit goal of collecting the money.
Having a gatekeeper prevents this somewhat, but this company seems more interested in some kind of idealistic anarchy.
Re: BitHub = Bitcoin + GitHub. An experiment in funding privacy OSS
#17This seems like a terrible idea to me. I believe the entire world of open source functions based on intrinsic motivation: people participate because the act of participation itself is enjoyable. This has some flaws (less fun stuff like docs don't get as much love), but unlocks a huge pool of untapped motivation in people.
Studies have shown that if you add in even a small amount of extrinsic motivation (i.e. pay people) it dramatically affects their perception of intrinsic reward. In other words, if you pay someone for doing the exact same thing, the task becomes less enjoyable.
If we start throwing cash around, it's going to have a huge impact on the psychological aspect of open-source, and probably not for the better.
Re: BitHub = Bitcoin + GitHub. An experiment in funding privacy OSS
#18My gut instinct was "this is perfect". However, sferik says it's made maintaining his repo much, much harder: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6882374 (SFErik had nothing to do with the bitcoin stuff; someone else put up the money and started it for his repo.)
Our hypothesis with this project is that any commit, even a "fluff commit," is better than no commit, and that the overhead of trying to build a more complex accounting model is higher than the cost of paying out 2% for "fluff." Basically, worse is better. But, we could be wrong! We'll see.
I actually think your attitude is the right one to have for this kind of experiment. We can pontificate endlessly on what people might do, how people might exploit such a system, but I'm of the (possibly naive) opinion that just because a person can, doesn't mean a person will.
I suspect that, despite the potential for abuse, you won't actually see very much actual abuse.
Re: BitHub = Bitcoin + GitHub. An experiment in funding privacy OSS
#19You could use the m-of-n feature of Bitcoin where a certain number of people from a larger group have to agree to a transaction and manage the funds for the project collectively like that. Whether to set rewards for committers, or just pay for the new build box.
Re: BitHub = Bitcoin + GitHub. An experiment in funding privacy OSS
#20This is very cool, but my initial reaction was "this is amazing" to a misunderstood model of what this is.
This is: Create a pool of btc, distribute to those who commit to current round.
What I thought this is: Anyone can tip on individual commits that they find useful or of exceptionally high quality, akin to Reddit Gold for code. This way, not all commits are treated equally and great commits can be compensated. To further the reddit gold analogy, this can tip for premium features (i.e. tip some btc or usd for a month of free github premium) or just straight out money.
I realize there's gittip, but this is on the level of commits, not developers.