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

I look forward to when StackOverflow integrates BitCoin.

I'm excited about the mix of coding and compensation. As a coder with a strong open source ethic, I feel there are enough secondary benefits to direct compensation to justify the potential loss in 'pure' motivation.

The twist I would like to see, which I feel fixes the fluff commit problem, is to write unit tests associated with a coin bounty. It puts a burden on the test author to write tests that are not easily gamed, but thats good practice anyways.

Hmm. I took a look at the code and was disappointed to see it's using the Coinbase API. Hardly decentralised.

Unfortunately it's hard to replace with direct usage of the P2P network because it relies on sending money to an email address: i.e. a trusted third party has to hold the money until the recipient picks it up. What if they never pick it up? What if they don't actually want bitcoins?

It seems to me like a decentralised solution would be easy to code up, if only we add an additional requirement: someone who wants a payout should put a Bitcoin address into the pull request or commit description. Then BitHub would be able to make payouts directly from its own wallet with no Coinbase dependency, and a committer has to opt-in to receiving the funds.

I might take a look at coding this up soon. BitHub is Java so using bitcoinj and XChange would be very easy.

I think Open Source would benefit from having both models.

Your model/the gittip model is good.

So many times, there are only a small handful of people who care about a bug being fixed or a capability added -- but that small handful are both willing and able to tip generously for work that meets their specific need! We've all been there. Either as an individual, an agency, or a software company, we've been in a place, dependent on a relatively lower-profile project where we'd cheerfully tip in the $50-$300 range. That's probably good for everyone. There are a few ways of doing this, but what you've described -- 'tip for this specific commit' -- is how easy we all wish it was. I wish it was a feature of github.

But their model is good, too.

Some open-source projects are relied upon by thousands, tens of thousands, or more people, and they want to know that everything, small and large, is being done to keep the software stable. As others have commented in this thread, this would be a way to pump up the ecosystem for popular, highly-depended-upon open-source software projects.

Sure, adding features like this might induce gaming. But if I understand their model, this may just mean that those reviewing pull requests may just need to take an additional factor into account -- whether or not the commits involved are substantive, or if they're too 'gamed'. It seems like it might be a self-licking ice cream cone, because larger-scale gaming (attempts to earn Real Money through mostly-frivolous PRs) could be caught by review, whereas minor cleanups for docs or comments in the commits of a PR that includes more substantive work might be, as other commenters have mentioned, perhaps just a few percentage points of 'wastage'.

I don't think we really know if it's feasible or not, but I applaud these efforts tremendously.

I also wonder if a hybrid system could work -- perhaps as a feature to be added to the 'tip for all commits' approach. Allow tipping for individuals, but a certain percentage (50%? 25%? something?) could go into the general pool for all accepted commits.

Alternatively, it may influence commit behavior. People may not want to be accused of filing fluff commits & slow their contributions to accumulate 'enough' changes to justify the payout.