This is gross to read because it's really about consent.
Please remove mitsuhiko/*
11–20 of 445 posts
Re: Please remove mitsuhiko/*
#12If minimum donation was say $5 and it notified you one time when you had $25, I do see the people who this would bother being edge cases. The tax thing is a good point, but I think it would be entirely reasonable and ethical to simply ignore any donations you got if you didn't want them, and not declare them. Perhaps Tip4Commit could auto forward any unclaimed tips to a charity if they are not claimed in a month. Ema…
The fact that they have a site on which they solicit donations for specific projects by name, without the permission of the projects involved, raises legal concerns both for them and for the projects if someone succumbs to the reasonable confusion that projects listed on tip4commit have some sort of fundraising agreement with tip4commit.
I've considered a few times figuring out what it would cost to give them a good once-over with an attorney, just because it seems historically that existential threats to their "service" are the only way they ever give even the minimal response to complaints.
Re: Please remove mitsuhiko/*
#13I'm confused to why this project is a good idea. It seems like they are collecting funds on behalf of a third party without that third parties consent and then distributing those funds, again without third parties knowledge or consent.
As much as the project seems to have good intentions, insisting that It's BitCoin, BitCoin is different doesn't mean your product is actually exempt from rules and law. Or that Bitcoin is all that different.
There is no reason someone couldn't build a similar project using traditional currency. But then they would run afoul of the many laws designed to protect depositors, investors, and the financial system writ-large. As someone remarks in TFA, holding the amount of currency on ones balance sheets this project would, if successful, is a terrible idea. It's ripe for fraud and abuse. There is a reason services like Gittip assist in transferring fund, and act as the debiter and depositor.
This whole thing is emblematic of the problems with Bitcoin culture, which seems to think it doesn't have to follow any of the rules. Sorry lads, if Bitcoin is currency, you have to behave like banks and investment firms if you are going to act like banks and investment firms.
Re: Please remove mitsuhiko/*
#14If open source parasites like tip4commit don't learn, the next logical step is to trademark projects and send DMCA notices without wasting any further time.
Also, with this kind of sleazy behavior, the advertising clause in the BSD license suddenly becomes very appealing again.
Re: Please remove mitsuhiko/*
#15If minimum donation was say $5 and it notified you one time when you had $25, I do see the people who this would bother being edge cases. The tax thing is a good point, but I think it would be entirely reasonable and ethical to simply ignore any donations you got if you didn't want them, and not declare them. Perhaps Tip4Commit could auto forward any unclaimed tips to a charity if they are not claimed in a month. Ema…
The fact that they have a site on which they solicit donations for specific projects by name, without the permission of the projects involved, raises legal concerns both for them and for the projects if someone succumbs to the reasonable confusion that projects listed on tip4commit have some sort of fundraising agreement with tip4commit. I've considered a few times figuring out what it would cost to give them a good…
The idea behind Tip4Commit seems sound to me, it just seems like they've executed it really poorly which is a shame.
Unfortunately can't seem to access their site, but if you're right and they are intentionally creating confusion then that is obviously a bad thing.
Re: Please remove mitsuhiko/*
#16Could somebody please provide some context?
tip4commit is one of a number of services which, without asking for permission or notifying you, opt your projects into a BitCoin-based crowdfunding system. Even if your project doesn't want it, even if your project has its own donation/support system you'd like to send people to. Historically they spammed committers of force-opted-in repositories with an email on every commit to tell them what their new BTC donation…
I wonder if you could threaten them with a cease & desist over a trademark violation? (Is there an argument to be made that they are illegally using your trademark to market their service by association?)
Would be interested to hear from someone with a legal background about this.
Re: Please remove mitsuhiko/*
#17I'm confused to why this project is a good idea. It seems like they are collecting funds on behalf of a third party without that third parties consent and then distributing those funds, again without third parties knowledge or consent. As much as the project seems to have good intentions, insisting that It's BitCoin, BitCoin is different doesn't mean your product is actually exempt from rules and law. Or that Bitcoin…
Can you point to where they believe they are immune to the rules because they're using Bitcoin?
To me it just looks like a badly implemented concept that happens to use Bitcoin. I'm not seeing any Bitcoin exceptionalism here.
Re: Please remove mitsuhiko/*
#18I do not normally rant, but tip4commit and its ilk are some of the most infuriating people in the world to deal with, since they're opting other people's projects into something that has all sorts of legal/taxation consequences and think that "we have no way to remove you once you get opted in" is an acceptable answer. I'd push complaints further up to GitHub, since I'm sure something in the way this works violates t…
Maybe contacting their hosting provider could be an additional way to approach the problem, since, from what I can tell, the messages they send to contributors are spam.
Re: Please remove mitsuhiko/*
#19I do not normally rant, but tip4commit and its ilk are some of the most infuriating people in the world to deal with, since they're opting other people's projects into something that has all sorts of legal/taxation consequences and think that "we have no way to remove you once you get opted in" is an acceptable answer. I'd push complaints further up to GitHub, since I'm sure something in the way this works violates t…
Maybe contacting their hosting provider could be an additional way to approach the problem, since, from what I can tell, the messages they send to contributors are spam.
We (Django) already threatened that a while back. They still insist they will not remove projects or stop collecting donations on behalf of non-consenting projects. All they did was manually disable some of the spam coming toward our committers.
Re: Please remove mitsuhiko/*
#20This is problematic in many different ways. Tax reasons are one. Noncompete agreements with exempts for non commercial / open source work another. Having a balance on this site, even if it's zero, can have severe implications for the maintainer(s).
I don't think it can have consequences - how would you justify punishing somebody for something somebody else did?