Please remove mitsuhiko/*
mitsuhiko opened this issue · comments
Please remove my repositories from the website and do not add a way to add them again. I do not value third party websites gameifying my projects.
Now, we can't remove repositories from the list, but you can turn off notifications for your projects and put a message saying you don't like this way of funding on your projects pages. ( like here https://tip4commit.com/github/django/django ) Would it be enough?
You can find your projects here https://tip4commit.com/projects/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=mitsuhiko&order=balance (nobody has funded them yet)
I'm not at all okay with what you guys are doing, just for the record. The only reason I discovered this is because someone forked your project and on another website money was accumulated. They did find a way to disable it: sigmike#110
Would it be enough?
No. Not at all. Please add support for blacklisting projects. I do not want to be associated with this kind of thing.
@mitsuhiko thanks for your feedback but you are not asociated with this (if some site publishes info about your projects that doesn't mean you are associated with it).
Please add support for blacklisting projects.
Could you please explain the motivation behind this requested feature?
We are doing the following:
- we distribute the public information about opensource projects and their contributors
- we enable anybody to tip contributors of these projects
What is wrong with it?
You are collecting money using the project's name.
Furthermore you're notifying new contributors about the possibility to recieve money for their commit as soon as their pull requests are merged. In your current notification emails there is no implication that this might be a process not endorsed by the project maintainers -- in fact, your terse messages make people assume tip4commit was explicitly set up and endorsed by the maintainers, because nobody assumes an unendorsed third-party service would send such intrusive messages on their own.
Thanks for your coments, @untitaker . I think I understand the problem now.
The main problem is that some people might think that we organize crowdfunding process on behalf of project maintainers.
But we don't claim we do, that is an unintendend consequence of how we designed the system, sorry if it caused troubles.
Do you think it can be fixed by just explicitly stating that we are not affiliated with the project we collect funds for and that project maintainers might not endorse this practice?
That would certainly fix one problem, but of course i can't speak for @mitsuhiko. IIRC it was also not obvious in those messages whether the user would recieve more emails for further commits, or if there is any action at all needed to opt out of all of this.
But nevertheless i think tip4commit should be opt-in instead, because i consider the current tactic to be a very intrusive form of growth-hacking.
Email notification happens only when contributor's balance hits the threshold of 0.005 btc (that is ~2$ at current rate). Recepient needs to know that s/he received money at least once so that s/he specifies his/her bitcoin address to receive them without notification in future. And of course it is easy to unsubscribe. See https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/blob/master/app/models/tip.rb#L115-L118 for details.
Can you please remove the projects? Can't be that hard to do. I really do not see much that should be discussed about this issue.
@mitsuhiko, everybody who visits pages devoted to your projects (https://tip4commit.com/github/mitsuhiko/werkzeug and https://tip4commit.com/github/mitsuhiko/flask) now sees a big red warning and hopefully understands that you are not affiliated with tip4commit.
Somebody added your projects to our database, I don't see much sense in removing them since anybody can add them back. Perhaps there should be a "black list" that prevents certain projects from being added. But I am not yet sure if we should develop this feature since motivation is not clear to me.
Why should we forbid people to send bitcoin donations to support open source project development or to receive donations for commiting to it?
I agree that it would be nice to explicitly warn users that we are not affiliated with project maintainers (to prevent confusion as @untitaker said). But currently it is quite obvious for the mentioned projects due to the warnings. Are your concerns resolved?
Why should we prevent people from sending bitcoin donations to open source project and from receiving donations for commiting to it?
Because people don't want them. Any donation that comes to me for instance I need to declare in my taxes and I need to provide information about where that is coming from. Accepting money at random is not exactly making my life easier especially when it comes out of things like bitcoin.
But aside from that, there are channels in which projects can be supported and those projects usually open them up themselves. Having random websites on the internet collect money on project's behalf is not okay in my book.
Instead of just subscribing projects make marketing and let projects sign up. That's what gittip does, that's how patreon do etc. And they also come with support for dealing with the paperwork.
Are your concerns resolved?
I can already see that this is an downhill battle so I will just accept the current proposed solution …
this sounds like a feature request to me - here are some suggestions for features that could be added to tip4commit
- only the repo owner or organization admins could be allowed to register their projects on tip4commit
- there could be a "remove project and withdraw funds" feature accessible only to the repo owner or organization admins
- individual users could opt out of receiving tips and tip4commit could publish this voluntary blacklist so that project maintainers could reject contributions from anyone who is not on that list - bear in mind that receiving tips is already on an opt-in basis - one must register a bitcoin address with tip4commit before any funds will be transfered
but regardless of any of these features - if the project source code is publicly available under a standard open source license than it is obviously not possible (not technically nor legally) to prevent someone from cloning such a project and giving tips for contributions to their clone - contributions from which the original repo would not benefit - unless the author crafts a more restrictive license that specifically discourages rewarding contributions they have not much to say on the matter
keep in mind that tip4commit is itself an open source project and someone would need to take the time to implement these features - the OP is so far the only person who desires such features so perhaps the OP would care to implement some of them
the OP is so far the only person who desires such features so perhaps the OP would care to implement some of them
No, the OP isn't the only one, the Django project would be another one. And your suggestion that we should implement those features to not get spammed or affiliated with sites we don't want to be affiliated seems like a bad joke to me.
im just saying someone has to do it and that wont happen unless it is clearly a desirable feature - i would work on it myself if i thought it would be generally appreciated - which is why i framed the issue as a feature request
I think people should be free to organize themselves if they like to. Project maintainers' involvement shouldn't be required nor is expected.
Project maintainers or developers don't really need to receive tips if they don't want to. If tips are unclaimed during 30 days, they get returned to the funded project's balance (i. e. back to the donations pool). That's already implemented.
I agree that people souldn't be spammed. Notification threshold is also already implemented and can be raised if needed, users don't receive emails for microdonations anymore.
What needs to be done is we should explicitly state that we are not affiliated with project maintainers in our emails and on the site.
I agree that people souldn't be spammed. Notification threshold is also already implemented and can be raised if needed, users don't receive emails for microdonations anymore.
You still choose to ignore the fact that sending emails without prior consent in a system like yours is illegal in many countries. Treshholds or not, you are just waiting till someone is annoyed enough to sue you.
Frankly speaking I am not quite familiar with laws of many countries nor I have enough money to hire a bunch of international lawyers. Do I need to learn all the laws of all the countries before publishing anything online or may I just use the common sense and conscience please?
Frankly speaking you can publish anything (well, most things) online, but as soon as you send unsolicited emails you have to bother with laws.
I don't think unsolicited email is the right term for the situation when somebody sent you a tip (otherwise that term would apply to any invitation to any social network, for example).
AFAIK in my country there is no legislation of email. If you could point me to the particular law I should conform, I would be thankful.
Do I need to learn all the laws of all the countries before publishing anything online or may I just use the common sense and conscience please?
To be honest: when it comes to handling money I would assume so. If this website would be dealing with a real world currency you would have a bunch of problems on yourself at this point. Most people would avoid holding funds on their books for an unlimited amount of time.
Don't build software you have to opt-out of and you have a lot less problems on your hand. Right now, this is dangerously close to being sued by someone.
That's why this kind of project is hardly possible with traditional money. This project was created during a 48 hour rails rumble competition. The beauty of Bitcoin is that everybody can use it to create something during a weekend.
This is not a commercial project, we don't have resources to hire lawyers and accountants. And of course we don't want to harm anybody. If we see that we are damaging somebody, we'll try to fix it.
Update: It is already opt-out for everybody unless s/he receives a tip greater than threshold.
Update2: If people receive tips greater than threshold and complain - we'll rise a threshold. We are not sending endless emails to random people. I think if a person received a tip - s/he should have a chance to know about it.
Why would anybody want to sue us?
Thanks for your warnings anyway (though I am not yet sure how to deal with them).
opened #136 to address at least one of the problems so far
I'll second everything that has been said by @mitsuhiko and @apollo13 in this thread.
- You're collecting money on our behalf (for various values of "our"), without our permission.
- You're talking to our contributors and teasing them with promises of money for their work.
- You're proposing to deliver this money to us without any concern for how we'll receive it, or how we'll account for it in our tax returns (are you going to issue a 1099 for US recipients? Or a group certificate for AU recipients?).
- You haven't taken any consideration for how money interacts with the commit process itself - a 1 line typo fix is valued the same as a 2000 line fix correcting a criticial transaction behavior in a database.
- Every time we commit a typo fix, our inbox is spammed by a bunch of emails (instead of, say, accumulating in an account and sending a monthly account statement).
- And, making the whole thing laughable, all this is being done to tell us that we've accumulated micro-cents of real money.
While I'm sure you're doing this with the best of intentions, I have a great deal of difficulty finding anything about this program that isn't either offensive or laughably naïve.
@freakboy3742 thanks for your feedback, every comment adds significance to this thread, but have you even read it before posting?
You're collecting money on our behalf (for various values of "our"), without our permission.
No, we are not collecting money on anyone's behalf. We are not affiliated with project owners. Sorry if it confused anybody, we'll fix it in #136
You're talking to our contributors and teasing them with promises of money for their work.
We are talking only to contributors that already got some tips.
You're proposing to deliver this money to us without any concern for how we'll receive it, or how we'll account for it in our tax returns (are you going to issue a 1099 for US recipients? Or a group certificate for AU recipients?).
That are small amount tips in Bitcoin, do they even need to be declared? If it were Linden dollars, would they need to be declared too? Recipients don't have to claim the money if they don't want it, I've mentioned it already.
You haven't taken any consideration for how money interacts with the commit process itself - a 1 line typo fix is valued the same as a 2000 line fix correcting a criticial transaction behavior in a database.
We don't pay for work, we just distribute a little gratuity from people who want to support the project and possibly attract more attention to it. If the commit is uselsess - don't accept it. If it is useful - why would you care if the contributor received anything for it or not?
Every time we commit a typo fix, our inbox is spammed by a bunch of emails (instead of, say, accumulating in an account and sending a monthly account statement).
That's not what tip4commit does. We don't spam bunch of emails. It's pretty rear event when we send out an email, see https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/blob/master/app/models/tip.rb#L115-L118 for details.
And, making the whole thing laughable, all this is being done to tell us that we've accumulated micro-cents of real money.
This problem has been solved. No notifications about micro-cents anymore.
Well, yes, this project might seem naive, but offensive? Perhaps we made some mistakes that offended people and are sorry for that. But we worked to solve that. It is normal that not all the people like the idea. But I hardly see how it can be offensive.
@freakboy3742's last comment hits the nail on the head.
I am sure that your intentions are good, that you want to encourage positive things and that you want to do engage with people in a respectful way.
Unfortunately, the economics of this undermine that: being informed that I have earned a fraction of a US cent (not even a fraction of a dollar) for several hours' work is not actually encouraging, nor does it make me feel that my time or work are being valued.
Finally, despite your good intentions, and while I think that the rewards we receive for participating in open source software are real and very encouraging, I don't think that small monetary rewards of this sort are amongst them. It seems to be missing the point, at least of my own participation.
So sorry to pour cold water and discouragement on your good intentions, but I don't think that your programme works the way you hope, and I don't think it makes people feel the way you hope.
@evildmp , thanks for your feedback, but as said above, we do NOT notify users on fractions of a US cent (or even US dollar). This was solved over a month ago. Min notification threshold is set to 0.005 btc, that is $1.75 at current rate, we might increase it if bitcoin continues to fall. Please accept apologies if you received such an email from us in the past.
Even though not everybody likes this project, there are many developers who find it useful and claim the tips.
This issue feels like listening to this again : https://soundcloud.com/ryan-block-10/comcastic-service
(And it's not good)
Please just respect people if they ask you to remove them from the project. Shouldn't be that hard.
just FYI, this issue is currently on the front page of hacker news:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8542969
@arsenische You really seem to be missing the point here. You are providing a service which inconveniences people (potential taxes), insults them (a few cents/dollars for hours of passionate work), spams them (emails for nothing more than a simple text update), and forcibly opting them into your service.
Opting-in in ppl is meh. Refusing to opt them out is stupid. Enjoy your PR nightmare.
Just want to chime in that I think this project is great, and that anyone who takes an issue with it is overreacting. It's not that hard to block incoming email, especially since it's all sent from the same domain. This also seems a lot more reasonable than complaining about people wanting to gift you money for your work.
Unless tip4commit is somehow profiting from this I don't understand why this would be a problem.
FWIW, in some tax jurisdictions, when you incur income or assets above a certain level, all income and assets must be declared regardless of their size. In Australia, bitcoins are treated like assets and so would have to be declared for capital gains on their disposal or usage.
FYI this issue has been recently featured in YCombinators Hacker News. You may want to consider how it affects the public image of your project - reception so far has been overwhelmingly negative.
This project is not great or clever in any way. It's not innovative, merely emulative. The fact that you willingly infuriate people by refusing to blacklist their projects indicates contempt for the people you're pretending to help.
Just as a friendly tip - since this is on the top of HN now I strongly recommend you use the GitHub "Lock" feature in order to prevent this issue from spiraling out of relevance.
Assuming that the owner and contributors of a project have no interest in using your service, where does donated money go? It seems rather presumptious to assume people want to use this, as has been made abundantly clear in this issue. The result: you collect money from people ostensibly donating to a project, and don't provide a way for owners to disable that.
My bet is that the accrued unclaimed Bitcoin balance will magically "disappear" one day when they are "hacked."
@arsenische Why is it difficult to filter certain projects upon request? It would have been a far better response than what you have got your project into.
@Kunjan It's not difficult; it's merely the cover for the real reason they won't do it: it's a threat to their business model to eventually steal or claim the donated Bitcoins for themselves.
this is fraud.
@r04r And therein lies the fraud. Donators assume their donations go to the project maintainers, not to tip4commit. tip4commit is knowingly creating this false impression, probably with the intent to claim unclaimed Bitcoins at a future date. On one hand they are extoring project maintainers to join the network, or else "lose" the donations; on the other hand, they are tricking people into thinking there is a relationship between the project maintainers and tip4commit.
In giant letters on their homepage:
"Contribute to Open Source
Donate bitcoins to open source projects or make commits and get tips for it."
Donators should be very, very leery of tip4commit as it is most likely a scam to collect Bitcoins at their own controlled addresses and eventually simply steal the Bitcoins outright.
if you did not made this project in an agreement between the project owners and potential contributors in money you have done nothing to earn a good faith in your intentions and have left a wide gap for misuse. simply put no one trusts you and i see no reason why someone should. the very idea of project, even if in good faith, sucks.
The thing that boggles me is that this was made "at a 48 hour rails rumble" and is not a core business or anything. Overwhelmingly people do not want this, just take it down and move on.
@nathan-alden I don't see how they are tricking people. The front page "How does it work?" blurb is fairly clear:
People donate bitcoins to projects. When someone's commit is accepted into the project repository, we automatically tip the author.
I can't find any claims anywhere that they are affiliated with these projects. I went to the "Supported Projects" page which made it immediately clear that I can add any new github project by adding its URL.
This request does not make sense and I think many people requesting project removal misunderstand the focus of the service. Removing your project from this service will not do what it seems is widely desired. The service does not collect money on behalf of any project, it is an attempt to enable individuals to throw money at other individuals who they would like to pay for their work on a certain project.
I understand the affiliation concerns (which have been addressed), and the desire to blacklist your project for personal objections to paid code in your project or the like, but these are extraneous and feels like people going overboard with bashing on a few careless (but ultimately harmless) defaults.
There may be multiple issues with when or how often emails are sent to users who have not opted-in to the service, or how the funds are dealt with after the 30 day period, but they're not relevant here to this issue; and THIS request makes no sense given the reasoning behind it.
Blacklist my repositories. I do not want a part of this.
#tip4commit what you could have done, is make a site where project owners can login via github and register their projects for money contributions. i'm sure there are, or case could be made, for tax exempts. advertise that site, attract the right audience in the right way, give them control over their accounts on the site, contributors (both) and the other aspects of an open source project on github. you could have charge for it in some amount just to keep the wheels turning and to prove to the community you are 'one of them'. it would be a real project idea, and more importantly, the right execution. at the end you would have helped the community if the site and the idea was to be successful. it is very hard to believe that you do not understand how what i just described is diametrically opposed of what you have done. you might very well damage the projects since every open source project has its dynamic and its contributors are communities, friends. you cannot bully this in. you are just increasing the bad faith and suspicion.
I support this project as it is. While I feel the request to blacklist sites is reasonable, no one is being forced to do anything here. If people want to give money to a third party with the intent of passing it on to developers, more power to them.
As long as there is a way to opt-out of the service for individual developers, I see no problem.
@lyndsysimon - so let us see how this can play out. due to demand bunch of junior developers rush in in search for money (in a way that is not in the spirit of building an open source project but in a wall street spirit) and clogs the development process and good developers or those who are long term contributors opt out.
Relevant: #146
How do you intend to make sure that unauthorised parties do not spoof the identities of actual (and uninterested) owners in order to collect their tips, especially when the actual authors are never asked to participate?
@csvan I'm simply pointing out the confusion that their use of personal names in tip logs could create, and asking them to remedy it. That's all I'm doing at the moment.
Talk to a lawyer, get him to sue this guy for you. Costs you a few hundreds, but it's quite painless otherwise. They'll run away scared, stop the service alltogether.
If you or anyone else is unwilling to do that, you should either complain to your government (for not providing effective means to follow up on law) or you should probably accept that this service is legal and does something permitted (or you should complain that the law is not good enough). Or maybe we're already beyond the idea that government solves problems?
That said, opt-outs might still be a good choice for tip4commit, as it prevents unlimited negative feedback. Or, maybe they're quite happy with the attention?
"Now, we can't remove repositories from the list" -- Why is that so hard to do exactly?
As stated above, the fact that the project authors have declined to remedy this is just another reason to not trust this or their intentions. If their intentions are in good faith, this would be remedied - otherwise it's absolutely dishonest and probably fraudulent.
As a general question, I'm curious why folks are comfortable with anyone being able to take their hard work and use it for something else (given this is all open source projects we're talking about) but not with a service using publicly available information to give people money?
In the spirit of innovation, why should you necessarily be in control of what people do with your work if you make it publicly available so long as they reference it? (which Tip4Commit does by directly linking to your project page on GitHub).
Saw this on YC, similarly upset. Please remove:
@nathan-alden Why are you making baseless assumptions that they are going to run with the Bitcoin? Not liking the project is one thing, but basically calling the developers thieves is way beyond that and quite pathetic.
@BLKSwan - i do not see anyone here from the open source claiming the right to control the use of their open source project beyond the license. it is the vice versa. the tip4commit is claiming the control over the open source project in a way not at all in the spirit of an open source project and moreover in a way that could be intentionally or unintentionally insidious. hence all the fuss. some people do not like it because it does not feel right. and it is not right. maybe you like that they picked up bitcoin but that is a limited view. you do not care for the consequences nor does the tip4commit.
It's pretty awesome to see that tip4commit doesn't bend to pressure from the typical project maintainers who are so used to abusing their power that they think they can force other projects to do what they want too.
Attention project Maintainers @AlexandrZ and @arsenische: If enough project maintainers are against you doing this I have no problem supporting the python community by contacting my lawyer in order to have them in turn contact github on their behalf, and at that point we would let github deal with you. Your move.
@mitsuhiko I know we have not always agreed on things but I support you in this. If you need some help with this and would like me to have my lawyer send github a request to remove them please let me know.
Same goes with everybody else who is against this projects dealings. The bigger the group against them the better but honestly I think the contents of this thread, once i send it to github support, will be enough.
@duaneking - on what legal grounds do you intend to sick the legal people on them? What exact crime do you accuse them of?
I have no problem supporting the python community by contacting my lawyer
I should clarify my comment above. I'll be composing an email to our lawyers (MediaCrush) if the response from the maintainers of this project is anything but "I'm sorry, we've removed your repository, it won't happen again". What you're doing is engaging in fraud, pretending to represent us and asking people for money, and then spamming contributors and tricking people into thinking that we support this cause.
What you're doing is engaging in fraud, pretending to represent us and asking people for money
They never claim to represent you or anyone else. The only real problem here, from what I can see, is the possibility of third-parties to spoof actual authors in order to collect tips on their behalf. The project owners themselves collect no money whatsoever for themselves.
That said, it is clear that this would be much better off as an opt-in service rather than what it is now.
They never claim to represent you or anyone else. The only real problem here, from what I can see, is the possibility of third-parties to spoof actual authors in order to collect tips on their behalf. The project owners themselves collect no money whatsoever for themselves.
Well, if they don't cooperate, our lawyers can argue about it. I'm not about to argue about it, I'm just telling it like it is.
I said I wasn't about to argue about it, and I meant it. I'm just giving them a chance to fix it amicably before we have to get lawyers involved.
@SirCmpwn Well from what I can see they aren't claiming to represent you anywhere on their website. But good luck with your legal proceedings and all.
Front page reads -
People donate bitcoins to projects
But they do not. They are donating(not exactly) to this project. This project is collecting money and spending them in the name of someone else's work without their consent. Right?
EDIT: Comment withdrawn to avoid pointless argument. The below is left only for the sake of context.
I'm just giving them a chance to fix it amicably before we have to get lawyers involved.
Fix what? Asking you to substantiate your claim is not "arguing about it". Can you at least demonstrate that your accusation against the maintainers has some real merit, or are you simply interested in having your way (by brute force if necessary) regardless of what is actually right and fair?
Couple of things that struck me:
- The project already claimed the "tip" when the contributer gives it. It doesn't make sense for someone to claim it again from tip4commit.
- Instead of adding projects when it is searched, It would be better to add the project when someone actually gives the tip. This way you keep the search feature and also dont trouble others.
- Not all people want to receive bitcoins. So some other alternative way of making the money reach the maintainer must be there.
- If nobody has claimed the "tip" (it is not a tip now) so it must be refunded to the contributor with the reason.
And also, I'm curious. What if people "donate" money to a project(I mean send money to this project's maintainers in the name of another project) and then that project never gets any commit from any other contributor. What happens to that donated amount?
@csvan Seconded. It seems like many of these developers are simply upset for the sake of being upset. Tip4commit has already added this to the bottom of their page:
We are not affiliated with most of the projects, their owners might not endorse use of tip4commit.
Legal action is very unnecessary and it just seems like many are threatening it to scare Tip4Commit, yet they don't seem to be doing anything wrong.
The email aspect of what you do may be illegal under US law as a result of the CAN-SPAM act.
If Wikipedia is correct, there is no violation of CAN-SPAM.
From Wikipedia:
CAN-SPAM, a direct response of the growing number of complaints over spam e-mails,[6] defines a "commercial electronic mail message" as "any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service (including content on an Internet website operated for a commercial purpose)."
Obviously, the primary purpose here is to give out the tip, not advertising the tip4commit service.
@arsenische seriously, just make the whole thing opt-in only and you will solve practically every problem you are currently getting flack for.
Your idea itself is great, but basically forcing it on developers is a terrible move. Don't do it simply because you may find the legal wiggle-room to do so, in the end it will just ruin the whole image of your project and undermine the good you wanted to achieve with it. Maintainers who want to get onboard with your programme will do so, and for everyone else you can just add a referral feature to notify them about the project and the possibility of joining it.
I for one do not think you have ill intentions with it, but public perception is everything when it comes to running projects which involve the work of people not directly affiliated with you.
@bill-myers please refer to the ftc website:
http://www.business.ftc.gov/documents/bus61-can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business
If the recipient has not opted in it may be considered commercial email.
Are people in this thread familiar with bountysource? They are doing the exact same thing:
https://www.bountysource.com/search?query=mitsuhiko
@csvan similar to the open source concept in general which allows for permission-less innovation, I see permission-less project funding as a central part of the Tip4Commit service. Making it "opt-in only" removes this. Why shouldn't a subsection of a project's contributors be able to use the service just because the maintainer doesn't like it?
@BLKSwan I think it boils down to a question of basic social ethics. Most people, I presume, would find the idea of others collecting donations for them, funnelled through a party they have not approved, completely without their consent, objectionable. Most projects already have their own donation schemes set up which they would like to refer their supporters to instead. Project maintainers who want to use a service such as tip4commit are perfectly able to sign up for it themselves.
That is only coming at it from a subjective angle though. There is a whole slew of possible legal implications, many of them laid out both on YC and the Bitcoin subreddit:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8542969
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2kz9x0/please_remove_mitsuhiko_this_guy_is_complaining/
If Tip4Commit were genuinely innocent in this, with purely good intentions, it would be opt-in right from the start. But it's not. They're most likely trying to make money with this, and just being dishonest about it.
Legal action is very unnecessary and it just seems like many are threatening it to scare Tip4Commit, yet they don't seem to be doing anything wrong.
We're getting off-topic here, but in some countries this is exactly the kind of abuse a poorly structured legal system allows. In some cases the very costs and risks associated with as much as defending against a highly dubious lawsuit may be so high that the defendant is forced to settle and just agree to shut down, even if they have not done anything wrong. That is why I find it so hard to like people who would rather just sick the lawyers on somebody rather than trying to have a reasoned debate and mutual settlement. It has everything to do with intimidation and nothing to do with actually wanting to see the right thing done.
IANAL, but I believe emailing people without prior consent (opt-in) is illegal in the country I live in, as it is in many countries. You may also be running afoul of charity or tax laws.
For your own legal safety and the sake of the projects you are trying to support your service should be opt-in, just like other services of this type (gittip/gratipay), not opt-out. Plus I doubt repository hosting services such as Github will take kindly to you spamming their users or accepting donations of their behalf without permission.
@csvan I guess I don't understand why you're comfortable with anyone being able to copy your work but not comfortable with random strangers being able to pay people that contribute to your projects using Tip4Commit if they so choose. No one is being coerced into using the service, it's simply providing an option to those that would like to use it leveraging publicly available information from GitHub. There's even a disclaimer on the main page that notes "We are not affiliated with most of the projects, their owners might not endorse use of tip4commit"
@jugimaster - I agree about the opt-in part, I do not agree that it necessarily demonstrates ill intent. People should maintain good faith unless there is a sound basis to accuse them of fraud.
@BLKSwan if I place my software under a FOSS license, I am giving my explicit consent to others to copy, modify and distribute my work according to that license. I have not given them any kind of permission to raise money for my project without my consent, especially not through channels I have by no means approved.
@csvan - I didn't say "fraud", but I think they're probably trying to make money with this. Tip4Commit must have known that's exactly what the project owners would not want, which would explain why Tip4Commit didn't ask them.
But when the project owners do notice, Tip4Commit can tell everyone they were just trying to help. I'm not buying it.
@BLKSwan what's your association with Tip4Commit?
Note that the "We are not affiliated with most of the projects, their owners might not endorse use of tip4commit" was only added in the past couple of hours in response to this.
Perhaps some honesty from the beginning would've prevented this whole thing from blowing up.
I don't want doctrine/* to show up as well, please remove us.
@csvan Under FOSS licenses, people generally have the right to profit from your work (e.g. Angry Birds had the right to make billions using zlib-licensed Box2D). This applies even to the (L)GPL (it is a common misunderstanding that the GPL forbids commercial use).
I see no problem with this at its most basic. In concept, I would defend the right for third parties to place bounties on work they deem useful. I think the real problem is the side effects. The maintainer doesn't want to silence the annoying notifications because it's his advertising, so you can expect him to be unreasonably stubborn (Exposure = more tips = more 1% cuts delivered to him). Also, will people start bombarding maintainers with tiny commits if this takes off, in hopes of getting a cut? Will maintainers start to reject commits out of concern that they're just for bounties (I submitted a pull request to Mitsuhiko's Jinja2 to fix a tiny typo I happened to see reading the docs. I didn't do it for pay. With tip4commit around, I may now be eyed with suspicion for things like that)
@BillyWM all very good and valid points.
@rapilabs as for me, it was pretty obvious we are not affiliated with project creators... the issue #136 was created a week ago after @untitaker informed us about the issue. Uder the pressure of current attention I just deployed a temporary urgent fix to prevent further confusion before a better solution is developed.
@arsenische wise actions, now go and implement that blacklist and show everyone that you aren't devious devs ;)
For your own legal safety and the sake of the projects you are trying to support your service should be opt-in, just like other services of this type (gittip/gratipay), not opt-out
This.
@rapilabs I am still in doubts. I feel that my arguments against it are left unnoticed. Just updated the https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/wiki/FAQ , quoting from there:
If somebody wants to reward independent contributors of random opensource project, does he or she needs a permission from project maintainers? Should project maintainers have the power over economic activities of other people?
@arsenische Not necessarily the project maintainers but when the project is a trademark then yes the trademark holder's permission might or might not be necessary depending on their trademark policy. And then raising money for certain individuals most certainly and absolutely requires their permission. You absolutely have no idea of the legal repercussions of what you are doing.
@rapilabs my apologies, I did not notice that was a recent addition. As for my association, I am just someone that likes the service, I have no direct ties to Tip4Commit outside of commenting here and donating on the site.
This is my profile on Tip4Commit:
https://coingiving.com/sponsors/174-blkswan
+1 on everyone pushing for this to be opt-in only. it is highly inappropriate to involve projects without explicit consent.
@chx we are raising money to tip any individuals who contribute to the project, that's not about raising money to some particular individual. if contributor doesn't claim money, the'll be returned to the donation pool. what's wrong with that?
@arsenische Yes, so an individual contributor can sign up claiming/showing his contribution to different projects? Why isn't that feature there?
You are currently forcing all contributors in a project to get involved. Why can't you see that?
If somebody wants to reward independent contributors of random opensource project, does he or she needs a permission from project maintainers? Should project maintainers have the power over economic activities of other people?
This is not only about project maintainers. You don't have the consent of the individual contributors either. Make it an opt-in system and all concerns raised here will disappear.