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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

#4

Post by Morgawr »

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 project leads us to. Maybe an actually fully decentralized open source employment career?

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

#5

Post by gkoberger »

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.)

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

#6

Post by Morgawr »

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 if somebody is trying to abuse the system then just give them 0.

A better way would be to set up issues with bounties (what is already mentioned in the article) so the actual developers can decide the worth of contributions before the contributions are actually made, in order not to do favoritism.

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

#9

Post by shtylman »

IMO bug bounty payouts are a more effective use of funds for a project. Paying per commit is like paying per line of code. At least with a bug bounty you (the giver) can specify which particular item interests you. If you want to donate money to the project as a whole, then it seems easier to just communicate with the project owner/maintainer and send them funds directly.

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

#10

Post by bdcravens »

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…

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.
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