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BitHub = Bitcoin + GitHub. An experiment in funding privacy OSS

whispersystems.org

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Re: BitHub = Bitcoin + GitHub. An experiment in funding privacy OSS

#21

Post by Morgawr »

diminoten wrote: post #16
gkoberger wrote: post #5

My 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, bu…

Although to be honest, after the first few changes to readme/documentation[.] there really isn't much more left to update. And the actual maintainer of the repo has the final say on deciding what will and will not be pulled in. If you are just sending me lines upon lines of refactored code that literally does nothing but just move stuff around, I'm not going to merge it. Simple as that.

[.] Finally! We'll be having people fighting each other for a more up-to-date documentation!

Re: BitHub = Bitcoin + GitHub. An experiment in funding privacy OSS

#22

Post by matthudson »

mateuszf wrote: post #13
Morgawr wrote: post #4

I 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.

I think that can be a feature as well.

Also, are the contributors anonymous in the sense that you have no way of knowing the identity of the contributor? Or, anonymous in the sense that the contribution originates from a particular pseudonym?

Re: BitHub = Bitcoin + GitHub. An experiment in funding privacy OSS

#23

Post by steveklabnik »

munificent wrote: post #17

This 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 peop…

Aren't you paid by Google to work on Dart? Apologies if I have the entirely wrong person.

How is that different?

Re: BitHub = Bitcoin + GitHub. An experiment in funding privacy OSS

#24

Post by dlsx »

I think you would be better off implementing something easier to use like dogecoin. The reddit community seems to be adopting it, and it seems much more reasonable to buy 1000 doge for $1 than .00001 BTC

BTC has a huge problem and the mBTC uBTC just ended up confusing people even more.

Re: BitHub = Bitcoin + GitHub. An experiment in funding privacy OSS

#26

Post by rch »

Morgawr wrote: post #6
gkoberger wrote: post #5

My 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.)

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…

Why not let the person submitting the request set the value? All the maintainer would have to set is a cap, so no strange values slip by on accident. The value of specific issues and milestones could be determined as a function of the global cap.

Re: BitHub = Bitcoin + GitHub. An experiment in funding privacy OSS

#27

Post by dmix »

I'm going to try this out. I'm a freelancer who wants to contribute front-end dev/UX/UI to OSS crypto projects but don't have the ability to join a project full-time. Plus most of my "free" time where I'd normally contribute to OSS, I'm now writing or maintaining my own projects.

I'm going to dig into WhisperSystems to see if there is anywhere I can contribute.

Hopefully more OSS apps do this.

It'd be nice if more projects open-sourced their marketing landing pages or homepage as well. I'd love to be able to do conversion-optimization and copywriting for OSS projects, instead of just programming.

Re: BitHub = Bitcoin + GitHub. An experiment in funding privacy OSS

#28

Post by OPISAFAGGOT »

dlsx wrote: post #24

I think you would be better off implementing something easier to use like dogecoin. The reddit community seems to be adopting it, and it seems much more reasonable to buy 1000 doge for $1 than .00001 BTC BTC has a huge problem and the mBTC uBTC just ended up confusing people even more.

My words exactly.

Re: BitHub = Bitcoin + GitHub. An experiment in funding privacy OSS

#29

Post by madcat123 »

yan wrote: post #20

This 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…

Sure, except that tippers (users) are not likely to be in position to judge the quality of a commit, nor really want to wade through hundreds of commits to decide which ones might be worth spending money on, and for the most part, just want to support the development of the project rather than micro-manage it. It's a nice ideal us developers can dream of, but the model implemented BitHub is just easier to use.

To use a restaurant analogy, a shared tip jar that gets split evenly at the end of the night results in much fairer distribution (and includes the chef and cashier as well) as opposed to personalized tips which get unfairly / unevenly distributed between waiters. Most people tip because of the full service, from ambiance to service and cooking, not just the front-man performance.

And you can still always ways to tip individuals developers (or waitresses) personally if you so wish.

Re: BitHub = Bitcoin + GitHub. An experiment in funding privacy OSS

#30

Post by swanson »

moxie wrote: post #14
gkoberger wrote: post #5

My 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.

When I saw the fluff commits I was immediately reminded of a conclusion from "Punished By Rewards" - once a reward is applied, people will start doing the minimum required to obtain the reward, as their motivation has shifted from intrinsic ("I want to improve the project") to extrinsic ("I want a reward, so what do I have to do to get it").
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