17 ms·

Please remove mitsuhiko/*

634 points by art2 12y ago

jarcane 12y ago
Ahh yes, the classic Bitcoiner approach of attempting to drive adoption simply by giving the damn things to people whether they want them or not.
- nnnnni 12y ago
  It's the Bitcoin Crusades!
- randallsquared 12y ago
  How awful! /s
  - lotsofmangos 12y ago
    Kittens are nice, but I don't think they should be automatically posted to everyone. Not all of the time, anyway.
- hokkos 12y ago
  Like a drug dealer !
  - wyck 12y ago
    More like a fraud artist.
josu 12y ago
Could somebody please provide some context?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- ubernostrum 12y ago
  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 balance was after the commit. And they insist that once a repository has been added to their system, they do not have the ability to remove it. This has legal and tax consequences they seem to be blissfully unaware of, and the best they'll offer is to stop sending you an email every time you make a commit. We (meaning the Django project) went a few rounds with them a while back and ultimately had to resort to threatening spam complaints against their ISP just to get the damn emails turned off. We still have been unable to get removed from the list of projects they "helpfully" collect donations for: https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/111 https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/111 The link in this thread is another major developer also attempting to get his repositories removed from their "service", and being stonewalled just as we were.
  - colanderman 12y ago
    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.
    - Niksko 12y ago
      Sounds plausible. IANAL, but I know there are similar protections for somebody's likeness. As in, you're not allowed to use somebody's likeness to endorse a product without their consent. I can't see why the same wouldn't go for using somebody's trademark to endorse a product without the trademark owner's consent.
    - ubernostrum 12y ago
      Like I said, it's something I've investigated. Best I can tell as a non-attorney acting on advice from others, the way in which they advertise their services could be easily confused as implying a financial relationship with organizations or individuals with whom they do not have a (consenting) financial relationship. Where to go from there is an open question. The bigger question, as always with such things, is whether they cause enough annoyance to be worth lawyering them, and whether playing whack-a-mole -- since they're not the only "service" which does this -- would be a prudent way to spend time and money.
ubernostrum 12y ago
I 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 their ToS, but ultimately that wouldn't do anything except cause them to self-host their code and keep running the "service".
- demetris 12y ago
  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.
  - csdrane 12y ago
    Not sure how the process works, but what about getting their domain added to Spamhaus's lists? [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spamhaus_Project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spamhaus_Project
  - ubernostrum 12y ago
    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.
    - brador 12y ago
      Assuming you had the muscle, what's the worst a dev could theoretically hit them with? Could they be succesfully sued? DMCA?
      - tachion 12y ago
        You do realise that there is life and even entire civilizations outside of the USA, where DMCA holds no jurisdiction and the entire idea of suing becomes much more complicated? Especially when it seems from the GitHub discussion thread the tip4commit founder lives in a place where there is no regulations regarding what is a spam and what is not. ;)
linohh 12y ago
This 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).
- danbruc 12y ago
  I don't think it can have consequences - how would you justify punishing somebody for something somebody else did?
  - sharpneli 12y ago
    In Finland all kickstarter style fundraisers are explicitly illegal, so is this. Basically any collection of money requires a special permit that is only handed to certain charitable causes etc. Otherwise it's paid work and has totally different rules governing it. In this case the person would have to prove that they're not involved with tip4commit. Quite likely the prosecutor would simply say that you're cheating and are trying to circumvent the law this way. Because how improbable it is that someone would collect money for you even if you wouldn't want to? So yeah. In some countries it might become a big problem.
    - danbruc 12y ago
      I don't think it would work out this way. Looking at tip4commit would make it quite clear that you don't have to be involved. And why would you have to prove that you are not involved instead of having the prosecutor prove the opposite? No not-guilty-until-proven in Finland?
      - sharpneli 12y ago
        Because they have been doing it before. Recently an exhibition called "Beer and Whiskey expo" was under threat due to it's name. Mention of Whiskey can be said to be an advertisement of strong alcohol. So they changed the name and it become just the Beer expo. After that they were informed that they will be denied permits unless individual bloggers with no connection to them would also remove mentions of Whiskey in their posts about the expo. In the end the individual bloggers removed the mentions to allow the exhibition to continue. Short description of what happened https://thriftyfinn.wordpress.com/2014/10/11/the-grand-whiskeygate-of-finland/ https://thriftyfinn.wordpress.com/2014/10/11/the-grand-whisk... for those who don't speak Finnish. So yeah. Actions of individuals whom you have no connection with can count against you here. Especially if the regulators think that you might be benefiting of them in some way, thus basically trying to cheat the system. Remember this. Not every country follows the "innocent until proven guilty" principle.
TomGullen 12y ago
If 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. Email spam is another good point, but if it was simply reduced to a one time email when you had accumulated $25 USD I don't see it as unreasonable. If they implemented the above I'd probably defend them. Right now not so much perhaps, micro cents of tips and lots of emails are understandably pretty annoying.
- ubernostrum 12y ago
  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.
  - TomGullen 12y ago
    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.
    - ubernostrum 12y ago
      I have no problem with crowdfunded donation services... so long as the person/project the donations are being collected for has consented to it. I have a large problem with forcibly opting me and projects I work on into this, especially since some of those projects have donation mechanisms already, and an even bigger problem with no way to opt out once in. And I have a huge problem with the implication that I or those projects have any sort of relationship with tip4commit other than one of saying "please stop this" and getting back "no" over and over.
colanderman 12y ago
From the FAQ: > What happens to unclaimed tips (if recipient doesn't sign in and specify his/her bitcoin address)? Funds that are not claimed during 30 days get returned back to the project. Presumably "the project" in the answer refers to tip4commit? If so, isn't tip4commit committing fraud by advertising that tips go to the intended recipient, when in fact, if the recipient does not participate, they go into tip4commit's coffers? (Or is "the project" a mistake and should read "the donor"?)
- pferdefleisch 12y ago
  This is very similar to Readability's revenue model and you can see how that turned out. http://blog.readability.com/2012/06/announcement/ http://blog.readability.com/2012/06/announcement/
- andrewstuart2 12y ago
  I doubt it's a mistake. If you ask me, it's more likely that this is the whole goal of "the project."
  - arsenische 12y ago
    > If you ask me, it's more likely that this is the whole goal of "the project." No, it is not. We just came with this idea for rails rumble competition, it was pretty spontaneous. Sorry if "to the project" sounds ambiguous, I meant "to the funded project" (not to tip4commit unless we are talking about tips to https://tip4commit.com/github/tip4commit/tip4commit https://tip4commit.com/github/tip4commit/tip4commit contributors).
- michaelmior 12y ago
  I assumed "the project" meant that the tip goes back into a general pool still dedicated to the particular project the tip was originally designated for. Then these funds would be available for redistribution when new commits are made to the project. I can see how "the project" could also be interpreted as tip4commit though and if that's the case, that's pretty lousy.
jedanbik 12y ago
This is gross to read because it's really about consent.
- teamhappy 12y ago
  I disagree. He explicitly consented to everybody doing whatever they want with the software. I just don't think it's fair to allow people to do one thing and then make them feel bad about it once they do it. --- Let me clarify a couple of things here so I don't have to write short replies to all of you. Let's start with the 3-clause-BSD license. It states that you aren't allowed to use the names of the contributors to endorse derived works. They don't do any of that so this is not an issue. Somebody brought up trademarks. If there's a trademark issue the legal situation should be clear and this issue should resolve itself in no time. Nobody likes lawsuits. I don't see how they violate any trademarks though. Somebody else brought up handles. This has always been an issue. It seems to boil down to if you like a project, it's okay for them to use somebody else's handle, if you don't, it's unacceptable. I don't think it's a good idea to build a moral argument on top of that. I'm pretty sure I'm guilty of this myself. The money/tax thing is very interesting. I really wouldn't know, but I don't think you can collect money on someone else's behalf. As in, it only becomes a tax issue/your money once you actually accept the money. If you're one of the people who think "GitHub should just shut these scumbags down" we might as well start shutting down political parties, newspapers and TV station we don't like. I don't want to live in a world like that. What upsets me the most is the fact that it becomes harder and harder to have a discussion about topics like this one. What's the point in having a discussion platform if everybody is expected to agree anyway? And even worse, if you don't immediately state that you don't support someone/something you're guilty by association somehow. I'm sad now. Please continue.
  - ubernostrum 12y ago
    Armin tends to BSD-license his work. And the BSD license includes a provision which forbids use of contributor names for endorsement/promotion without permission. So, no, "consent" is not what Armin did. In fact, he did the opposite of that.
gerbal 12y ago
I'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.
- waterlesscloud 12y ago
  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.
  - lotsofmangos 12y ago
    The Bitcoin exceptionalism is clear in this bit: ---- arsenische - 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? mitsuhiko - 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. arsenische - 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. --- From this it seems that not only do they think it avoids legal issues, but they do not consider publicly raising bitcoin to be a commercial project that needs lawyers or accountants.
sfk 12y ago
If 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.
- matrix 12y ago
  Agreed. This behavior is not benign "naughtiness" (as the YC guys like to encourage), it's parasitic exploitation of other people's hard work. Another group I'd lump in with this group is readthedocs.org
  - freakboy3742 12y ago
    Why you put Read The Docs in the same category? RTD doesn't host anything unless you specifically set up an account and say you want to use them. They don't troll the web looking for projects, and hosting their docs whether they want them to or not.
  - legutierr 12y ago
    readthedocs.org? How so?
    - matrix 12y ago
      I put readthedocs in the same category because they try to look like the original source of the documentation. They lift the content and style, lock stock and barrel, and then try to rank higher than the actual project's documentation pages. I have in the past, unwittingly read out-of-date documentation because it looked exactly like the source site, and I didn't pay close attention to the URL. If they were truly ethical, they would not try to impersonate the original sites. It fails one of the most basic tests for trademark infringement (which is, essentially: "might someone in a hurry mistake it for the real thing?").
      - woof 12y ago
        Keep on trollin'
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
scotty79 12y ago
So basically main point of opposition boil down to: 1. "Don't use my project name to collect money for me!" Why not use your project name? Did you trademarked it? If not, then it's just public information and you can't control how anyone chooses to use it. No one is collecting money for you. The guy just collects money and promises to give it to you if you ask. Until you ask it's his money. 2. "Don't spam!" Well, spamming is certainly in bad taste. I guess he just wanted to make sure people know that he will give them some money if they ask. Probably mistake on his part. 3. "There might be some laws against some of those things in some countries." So? There are countries that have laws that say that being gay is illegal. Nobody cares about all the laws. I think it illustrates that you should "do NOT as you would be done by" because you might have different tastes. Personally I'm all for free pennies and all possible schemes of bringing money to developers so they can do what they wan't instead of do what others tell them to do.
- DanBC 12y ago
  > No one is collecting money for you. The guy just collects money and promises to give it to you if you ask. Until you ask it's his money. Did you see the bit of US tax law helpfully posted elsewhere in the thread?
  - scotty79 12y ago
    I just did. What a bizarre construct. Totally unenforceable. You'll get 'civil forfeiture'-d 50 times at random before IRS will charge you with that and wins. Besides it's not uncashed check. It's verbal (or even virtual) promise made by person in another country. If Nigerian prince offers you 500000$ you just need to claim do you have to pay taxes on that?
    - meepmorp 12y ago
      > I just did. What a bizarre construct. Totally unenforceable. Y Oh, well thank god for that. Whoever might have legal issues with this can just tell the relevant authorities in their country that scotty79 on HN says it's bizarre and totally unenforceable, and that'll shut them right up, won't it. And, also, hey who gives a shit if the people involved in the various projects want their project associated with this. If there's no legal means to prevent it, then it's 100% ok because there's no such thing as just respecting the wishes of the people involved and being a decent person. After all, those people for put their code out there in public, so they have it coming and fuck them if they don't like it. Can you seriously not see why people have a problem with this? And why it'd be good for the folks running the site to not automatically include whoever they please in their scheme, and to allow projects to remove themselves if asked?
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
brador 12y ago
My money is on the old Bitcoin play of "we were hacked" once they have a large enough balance of donations.
- apendleton 12y ago
  As someone else has already pointed out, they don't even have to pretend to get hacked to get to keep contributors' money. The model of dispensing 1% of balance per commit guarantees that it's impossible to get all of a project's contributions back out again.
naringas 12y ago
in a nutshell they're refusing to implement a blacklisting mechanism and being stubborn about it.
- cookiecaper 12y ago
  Since the project is open source itself, I wonder if they'd accept a pull request that implemented a blacklist.
  - ahome1 12y ago
    That would be an interesting way to deal with the developer's response that he add one himself: "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."
  - theonewolf 12y ago
    They actually claimed/stated that if you want these features, go code them yourself.
- davesque 12y ago
  Right, seems like it to me. This other stuff about the legitimacy of Bitcoin, taxation on uncollected payments, etc. seems a little over the top. However, I do think there's an interesting debate on the opt-in/opt-out issue. People are saying that Google itself is an opt-out system, but the "right to be forgotten" seems like a real concern to me.
Dewie 12y ago
I received a tip from tip4commit for a merged pull request to some github repository. The tip was too small to "cash out" on though, and I think I might have needed 40 or more tips like that in order to get a sum that was redeemable.
TallboyOne 12y ago
Wow, fuck that guy.
shangxiao 12y ago
I wanted to tell these guys that they remind me of the infuriating Comcast guy who refused to disconnect the customer's account, until I saw that somebody else felt the same way and had already told them.
pistle 12y ago
You know what really helps open source developers? Annoying them until they say f-it. Not only is os its own sort of challenge, but then you get a ghetto bitcoin angle going on it... and these tips sort of amount to shit. Big contributors (likely alternatively funded well beyond the tips) don't see much and small contributors get fuck all. And that unclaimed currency goes back to the "project?" Stop.
nakovet 12y ago
Maybe it's time for a LICENSE addendum? "Unless the services stated here, no money should be collect in the project behalf. "? I know it's not a good solution, but it's a solution, where you can file license violations wherever they host this project.
- aidenn0 12y ago
  IANAL but I don't think that would work unless tip4commit is using your software; otherwise they don't have to agree to your license.
  - nakovet 12y ago
    Good catch, all they are using is the project name. =( I guess a license addendum would have no effect.
coldtea 12y ago
The best thing would be to get GitHub to close this scumbags down.
bhc 12y ago
I believe Flattr does something similar. They will accept donations on behalf of a YouTube channel (or Instagram, Soundcloud, etc.) whether the content creator opted in or not and release the fund when the creator claims his/her donations.
- untitaker_ 12y ago
  The key word is _similar_: Flattr doesn't send any unsolicited emails and doesn't actually collect money until it gets claimed. tip4commit does both.
- imrehg 12y ago
  Bountysource[1] seems to be even closer, not sure if that got any such complaints. [1]: https://www.bountysource.com/ https://www.bountysource.com/
  - bhc 12y ago
    I think the issue here might be Bitcoin. Many sites that deal in Bitcoin get "hacked" and the balances disappear, allegedly into the site operators' pockets.
  - gerbal 12y ago
    Bounty Source makes it pretty clear the bounties aren't from the project maintainers, and bounties aren't collected or solicited as if they are from or for the project maintainers..
- MrUnderhill 12y ago
  I was wondering about Flattr as well. You can connect your account to Github, and the owners of repos that you star will be "flattred". I've done this a few times, some that haven't been claimed yet too - I admit it never crossed my mind that it could be nothing but an inconvenience to the recipient.
roganartu 12y ago
The tip4commit website is vulnerable to Heartbleed: https://filippo.io/Heartbleed/#tip4commit.com https://filippo.io/Heartbleed/#tip4commit.com Don't sign in or register or you may have more to worry about than undesired tax liabilities. EDIT: It's fixed now.
- brunoqc 12y ago
  Did you tell them? EDIT: I did https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/147 https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/147
  - WhoBeI 12y ago
    I'm sure he sent them a notification about their new account on his website on which, if they create an account, they may or may not find information of value to them.
- arsenische 12y ago
  Thank you very much! I am quite surprised because I remember fixing this issue in the same day patch became available and I run update recently. Upgrading the distro, hopefully it fixes the problem.
  - apendleton 12y ago
    Upgrading the distro is likely insufficient, as your private key has potentially (likely, at this point) been compromised. At a minimum you need a new key and cert.
coldtea 12y ago
One useful exercize would be to read the "right to forget" thing within the frame of this exchange.
SchizoDuckie 12y ago
https://tip4commit.com/projects/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=popcorn&order=balance https://tip4commit.com/projects/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=... 4 project currently listed under popcorn time. Great, he just painted an extra bulls-eye on their heads beause now they're making money with the project. Food for lawyers.
jnbiche 12y ago
These kinds of episodes are making me increasingly depressed. On one hand, I'm incredibly disappointed in the ethics and morality of some of the people who have latched on to Bitcoin. And sadly, I'd have to include tip4commit in that group, particularly since they are "opt-out" and yet have been spamming people after each commit [ubernostrum points out below that they aren't even "opt-out", since they're not honoring opt out requests]. At best, it's poorly thought out. They may have good intentions, but they've implemented their intentions in a very sketchy manner. Completely unacceptable, and I understand people's anger. Bitcoin has attracted more than it's fair share of assholes, and I understand the frustration people have toward such people and companies. On the other hand, I'm even more saddened by the irrational hatred so many developers have for Bitcoin, who refuse to acknowledge that not everyone who is interested in Bitcoin is a scammer or lunatic. I have met some incredibly honest, generous, and kind individuals in the Bitcoin community. And the Bitcoin project holds such promise for the financial world, if it's not first destroyed by scammers, regulators, and close-minded developers. As just one example of what drew me to Bitcoin, Bitcoin holds (or used to hold) such tremendous promise for the developing world, and to people who are shut out of traditional banking. It's bitterly disappointing to me that so many people are intent on destroying Bitcoin because its implications are perceived to threaten their political beliefs, or because of some kind of jealousy toward the imagined wealth of earlier adopters. The contempt around here is palpable, and it's directed toward anyone associated with Bitcoin. The emotions here are so intense that we have HNers pulling out the DMCA, which is so hypocritical coming from certain people that I am left speechless. Can we please bear in mind that Bitcoin has many, many ethical, kind, honest developers and users, and that not everyone should be painted with this brush of contempt that some of you wield so recklessly. Bitcoin has the misfortune to have experienced an huge gain in price last winter, which drew in an inordinate number of scammers, opportunists, and speculators. We, the developers and users of Bitcoin, are not to blame for these types of dishonest people. Very often, we are their victims. If Bitcoin does fail, a large part of the blame will be one the shoulders of so many software and IT people who make a flash decision that Bitcoin was "tulips" or a "ponzi scheme", and who refused to change their minds in the face of evidence otherwise (like scores of established corporations choosing to accept Bitcoin). I actually worry now that some of my Bitcoin open source contributions in my real name will be held against me now. All my hard work building a great Github repo is going to be discounted because people see contributions to one or two Bitcoin projects in my "contributed to" Github section. The whole situation makes me sad beyond belief.
ayrx 12y ago
Even ignoring all the legal implications, it's pretty damn rude to reach out to people contributing to open source projects on their own free time without asking for anything in return and offer them a few measly dollars for hours of work.
- milkyway 12y ago
  That's what I hate about these "bitcoin tips". Should I act all surprised and glad when someone on reddit "tips" me 4 cents? Price of my time it takes me to "collect" that tip is higher than the tip itself, by factors.
- jschwartzi 12y ago
  In fact, this communicates entirely the wrong information about the value of their work. If I were looking to encourage people to work on open-source projects, I certainly wouldn't try to entice them with a pittance too small to even buy a pack of gum.
  - ayrx 12y ago
    Exactly. As an active open source contributor I'll be very insulted if someone offers this to me without me opting in. If I want money I look for jobs or clients. Literally any other job in the world will pay more than this ever will. I'm not doing open source for the money.
- scotty79 12y ago
  I'd be delighted to receive even a dollar for the work I did for free. If an old lady gives you 0.50$ for carrying her groceries up the stairs you just take it to aprecciate her apprecciacion.
wheaties 12y ago
The Django project has done their complaint the right way. They asked to be removed, voiced the reason why and then have threatened to open a complaint to the email provider, Mandril, for unsolicited email, i.e. spam. See here: https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/111 https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/111 This is probably the tactic that people should use for sites that do email mining and unsolicited emails. Good for them.
sjs382 12y ago
Please send donations for the Django project directly to me. Once the donations accumulate to more than $3000, I will email the Django developers, requesting that they come get the donations. <whisper>And if the Django project doesn't come get the donations within 30 days, we don't tell you what happens to the donations. What happens to the money, if its not claimed, may (or may not) go against the wishes of yourself or the Django developers (that we're collecting money on behalf of, without permission). Also, sending these donations exposes the developers to serious legal consequences.</whisper>
lkrubner 12y ago
These "funding" schemes keep popping up in different contexts. Journalism attracted a bunch of these schemes 5 to 10 years ago. Consider what Mike Krahulik said about Kachingle: "you can't just start collecting money for me without some kind of deal." http://webcomictweets.com/detail/tweet/138771362931163136 http://webcomictweets.com/detail/tweet/138771362931163136 Kachingle was an extreme case, gathering "donations" for sites like Wikipedia, Google News, and also small sites like Mike Krahulik's. Using this approach on Github is just a new variation on an old scam. As someone else said in that same thread: "that is the weirdest creepiest business model ever."
- aaronmusk 12y ago
  who says there is a business model behind this?
untilHellbanned 12y ago
Bitcoin subreddit thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2kz9x0/please_remove_mitsuhiko_this_guy_is_complaining/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2kz9x0/please_remov...
art2 12y ago
What is staggering is that one would assume that this service was created with the aim of helping open source developers, but when the developers ask personally to make a reasonable change to how the site is functioning, the owners decline. So the reason the site exists is something different. I don't think it's fraud. It's probably the weird culture of the (younger) part of the Bitcoin community, for whom the Bitcoin is more like cultural revolution. It's hard to rationally explain why liking Bitcoin leads to liking tip4commit's approach, but surely the Bitcoin revolutionists like to place themselves above the rest, and don't see themselves as a part of the "old" world (legal, financial system etc.). For example, the currently highest-voted comment on /r/bitcoin for the story [0] says "I disagree with him [mitsuhiko]". [0] http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2kz9x0/please_remove_mitsuhiko_this_guy_is_complaining/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2kz9x0/please_remov...
- mbesto 12y ago
  I think it's fair to say that the vocal majority of BitCoiners have a very naive view of some basic economic concepts.
  - WallWextra 12y ago
    Also that they like ramming it down everyone's throats.
    - techrat 12y ago
      Given the value of BitCoin relies on desire and the only way they can possibly convince people that they want BitCoin is to spam it until they believe it...
  - wyager 12y ago
    >a very naive view of some basic economic concepts. Which concepts in particular are you referring to?
    - shiven 12y ago
eof 12y ago
I'm really, really surprised and confused by what seems to be the overall sentiment here. This tipping project was born of a hackathon combining cryptocurrency (cool) and supporting open source projects. Awesome! Then when people started getting tipped tiny amounts it generated spam... annoying, but it was fixed. It's a bit outrageous to claim that emailing someone after they have received free money (over some threshold) to invite them to accept it is going over the line. Claims about taxes, etc.. are laughable. HOW DARE YOU GIVE ME FREE MONEY AND ALLOW ME TO DECLINE IT. Give me a break. Overall the tone of alexanderz is extremely reasonable. It is not clear to me why the equivalent of a social-site invite being emailed on behalf of some user is suddenly worth getting angry and talking about international spam law. Especially when the exact same opt-out functionality exists. Click one button and never seen another email.. what's the deal here.
- maxerickson 12y ago
  I guess the aspect you aren't addressing is that people feel like a listing on the site creates an association between the site and their project (quoting from the bug report I do not want to be associated with this kind of thing.). You can disagree about whether the listing implies an association and disagree that such an association is a bad thing, but it should be clear enough that there are people who do think it creates an association and that they do not want that appearance.
  - eof 12y ago
    fair. It seems 'opt-out' is fine to me though and here is why: I want to contribute to some persons tiny little 4-stars github project because it saved my ass.. it is a bit audacious for long-tail repos to be signing up to accept tips; but sometimes my long-tail tip will cross her long-tail repo. Even more, what does mitsuhiko care if other people are getting money for contributions to his repos. If mitsuhiko is getting spam or seeing stuff in his issue queue despite opting out; that is a serious breach of ettiquite. It doesn't seem to me this is the case though.. it's like he is angry that other people are getting emails?
    - 12y ago
drivingmenuts 12y ago
In theory, I can association anyone with tip4commit just by searching for their project by name/project, correct?
hayd 12y ago
"each new commit receives 1% of available balance" So if you put a dollar in the account, even after 100 commits there's still 36 cents leftover (assuming every commit is "claimed"). Which is to say, by construction most of this money is going to remained unclaimed.
- GhotiFish 12y ago
  that's true, seems like there should be a way for funds to be exhausted at some point, and it could lead to a bit of spam.
aaronmusk 12y ago
It's a bit sad and annoying to see educated people with uneducated opinions on something that is as clear as my command line. The guys are not impersonating anyone nor taking any money from anyone. Google is opt-out tool and I don't see anyone complaining. There is absolutely nothing wrong with people bringing extra attention to someone's project and if contributors are going to make money in the process, that's epic. Yes, they probably should have emailed contributors less often but they've fixed it. Instead of complaining, come up with ideas to make it better... in the end, that's what this kind of community should be all about. BTW, get your ego's checked... seems like it's a bit inflated... and if you are going to sue anyone, think about your federal income tax... because that money is actually stolen from you :P
- DanBC 12y ago
  > Google is opt-out tool and I don't see anyone complaining. I see plenty of people complaining. That's why "Right to be forgotten" has so much traffic in EU. > Instead of complaining, come up with ideas to make it better People have suggested ways to make it better. The project has ignored them.
GhotiFish 12y ago
could someone explain the problem me? I'm not 100% on this service, and I'm not sure I follow the issues here (are they skimming from donations? Is that the problem? Most charities do...) he says tip4commit is profiting off their project, but, it seems like they're just storing the money till the dev claims it, if he wants it. Alternatively, what if I were to hypothetically state the following?: I will give the dev who contributes a pull requests that fixes this issue: https://github.com/mitsuhiko/flask/issues/1092 10 dollars. Have I commited an unfair act? Have I violated mitsuhiko in some way? Is the dev that claims this 10 dollars immoral? is mitsuhiko harmed? I am honestly assuming I'm missing the intricacies here. Could someone explain?
- DanBC 12y ago
  Some countries have strict rules about soliciting or collecting donations. People in those countries want to avoid the small possibility of legal trouble. They want to opt out of the project. The project refuses to allow any form of optout. This means that some people in some countries may have to sepnd time (and this money) talking to police and explaining what's going on. Dumping this time + cost burden on someone else when they have specifically asked to avoid it is sub-optimal. As an example of a group who were interviewed by police and who had to explain that their local group was not soliciting donations - the US parent group was: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8543640 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8543640 There was another problem which has since been fixed. The project would send out an email when a tip had been donated, even when it was a tiny donation and even if the receiver was not able to withdraw that tip. This is unsolicited and probably bulk and thus meets the treshold for spam. Finally it's not really clear what happens to the money. Say you're involved in $OpenSourceProject. Now imagine I donate a few US cents (but in bitcoin) to GhotiFish for a commit you made to $OpenSourceProject and you never collect it. This thread uas clarified that the money goes into a pool for $OpenSourceProject. But what if they never collect it? Tl:dr get permission from people before you use their name or project-names in your stuff.
  - GhotiFish 12y ago
    Well all that is fair, the devil definitely is in the details here. I can empathise with the reasons to avoid opt out for them, if they view themselves as a transparent third party, then their perspective would be the same as the suggestion I put forward. That people are putting their money towards a project by their own volition. From that perspective, there's nothing the owner can do about it but ask people not to do it. My post was made before I had gone through the bulk of text in this discussion, so I can see the issue there. I have to agree with all your points, but your conclusion and ours are different. Despite the complications, I don't see why a projects head have an innate right to prevent donations to that projects developers. I keep seeing this sentiment come up over and over. I do disagree with that. Thanks for summarizing the issues!
grkvlt 12y ago
I really don't understand the hate and anger that seems to be being directed at the developer, in particular the constant stream of assertions that the project is a scam, fraudulent, and created with the intent of cashing out with everyone's donations after pretending to be 'hacked'. It seems like this sort of accusation is more likely to be a cause for legal action _by_ @arsenische rather than the flimsy pretexts for legal action _against_ them. The developer seems to have created this during a hackathon as a fun little project demonstrating what can be achieved using the GitHub APIs and Bitcoin; I'm quite impressed at the end result, to be honest. I don't have any real need for the service, since my employer pays for me to work on open source projects anyway, but if I was wanting to raise beer money from a side-project I don't see any reason not to consider it. As for the opt-in mechanism, it looks like they have resolved most of the issues, and many of the complainants have never interacted with the project until reading about it here - the number of complaints about SPAM and assertions of illegality are amazing, all from people who have never received an email from tip4commit. These days it seems laughable to complain about unsolicited email - perhaps it was a problem in the days of USENET when messages cost real money to deliver over expensive leased lines and dial-up connections, but today with filtering and cheap bandwidth it makes no sense...
- gnud 12y ago
  The outright refusal to de-list projects makes this seem very suspicious. It makes it seem like they want to capitalize on well-known oss projects, and more or less trick people into giving money, when there's no clear entity behind the service and no clear rules about what happens with "unclaimed" money. The two obvious explanations here are "scam" and "thoughtless developers". In either case, I wouldn't want any project I was associated with, listed on their page.
CHY872 12y ago
Here's an interesting one. They only email contributors when they have over 0.005 BTC sitting around. So any contributor who over their lifetime is donated less than 0.005 BTC is never told that the money has been given to them. So we can reasonably expect that almost all the money put into this service will end up sitting around and not going to the people it's supposed to help.
msiemens 12y ago
Fun fact: mitsuhiko also asked a fork of Tip4Commit to remove his projects. Now their page states [1]: > This project has been disabled. It doesn't accept donation and it will not distribute tips. > Reason: Project author request: https://github.com/sigmike/peer4commit/issues/110 https://github.com/sigmike/peer4commit/issues/110 On the other hand, Tip4Comment has only this notice [2]: > Project maintainers have decided not to notify new contributors about tips and they probably don't like this way of funding. [1]: http://prime4commit.com/projects/129 http://prime4commit.com/projects/129 [2]: https://tip4commit.com/github/mitsuhiko/flask https://tip4commit.com/github/mitsuhiko/flask
DonHopkins 12y ago
Oh, no: now all we need is for ISIS to start using tip4commit to contribute to open source projects, and we'll be living in a South Park episode.
twa927 12y ago
A few things I found about tip4commit by searching through reddit: - 4 months ago Bitcoin Core was happy to raise 1.8BTC in two days using tip4commit [0], but today's comment [1] signals they are not happy with tip4commit, because it encourages submitting large number of small commits - an IT World article about 40% donations being unclaimed [2] (1.384BTC) - "we discovered a security breach" [3] - OpenBazaar, a fork of Dark Market, a market for drugs, encourages to make donations using tip4commit [4] - "Tip4Coin donations look like they are stolen" [5] Unfortunately it looks like a typical Bitcoin project - naivety of the authors, in terms of technical and legal matters, plus douchebag attitude (ignoring others, even if they are owners of things they profit from), plus shady entities benefiting from them. [0] http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2993ja/good_news_everyone_since_june_25th_we_have_raised/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2993ja/good_news_ev... [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2kzlsh/tip4commit_spammy_as_fuck/clq7fyn http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2kzlsh/tip4commit_s... [2] http://www.itworld.com/article/2693360/cloud-computing/linus-torvalds-and-other-developers-are-leaving-bitcoins-on-the-table.html http://www.itworld.com/article/2693360/cloud-computing/linus... [3] http://imgur.com/Qd6EPZ7 http://imgur.com/Qd6EPZ7 [4] http://www.reddit.com/r/DarkNetMarkets/comments/27bdlo/its_coming_drug_auctions_on_openbazaar/ http://www.reddit.com/r/DarkNetMarkets/comments/27bdlo/its_c... [5] http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/20bvau/tip4coin_donations_look_like_they_are_stolen/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/20bvau/tip4coin_don...
- gnud 12y ago
  There's also the small matter of their fee [0][1], which I do not see mentioned anywhere on their landing page. [0] http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2kzlsh/tip4commit_spammy_as_fuck/clq9cl3 http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2kzlsh/tip4commit_s... [1] https://tip4commit.com/projects/914/deposits https://tip4commit.com/projects/914/deposits
Tehnix 12y ago
I don't really see a problem with this, and feel it's been blown waaaaaaay bigger than it should have been. They even included "We are not affiliated with most of the projects, their owners might not endorse use of tip4commit." at the bottom of their frontpage.
arsenische 12y ago
First, I want to apologize. We have received a lot of negative feedback suddenly and I can assure you that we take it seriously. I temporary disabled ALL the email notifications (even though I don't think they were a real problem) and added a warning that we are not affiliated with project owners. When my teammate is online he will probably also some of the other issues. I see a lot of misinformation about tip4commit and our intentions. I can't quickly respond to everybody, but I'll try to keep basic answers here: https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/wiki/FAQ https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/wiki/FAQ Perhaps some people just misunderstand the project and hate it. Also I think that it is normal that developers try to understand the motivation of users and ask questions in order to find a better solution, please don't take it as offence or reluctance to change. We are going to resolve every issue or close the project. Btw, if you think this project shouldn't exist - welcome to https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/157 https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/157 - that could be the easiest solution for all of us. If you believe the project can be improved - welcome to leave your feedback on the desired improvements, such as https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/152 https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/152 and https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/154 https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/154 or others. Thanks for reading this and please accept apologies if we offended you (never wanted to).
- kancer 12y ago
  I don't know if this happens often but I would like to take a moment and point out that after hearing a strong negative reaponse, It's nice to see that the developer is willing to work through the problems with the community to change his/her project to a better state.
  - stfp 12y ago
    Yup, points and kudos to them for engaging with users/critics. OTOH, still negative infinite points for even arguing when a maintainer comes in and asks to opt out.
- sjs382 12y ago
  >> Btw, if you think this project shouldn't exist - welcome to https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/157 https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/157 - that could be the easiest solution for all of us. The project should be opt-in or shouldn't exist at all.
BuckRogers 12y ago
1 of 2 fixes needed here. 1. Unclaimed money is never processed/withdrawn from the donor 2. Opt-in only That's it.
mjuchli 12y ago
I started a project called Issue-Bidder (https://issue-bidder.com/ https://issue-bidder.com/) with the same concept before I even knew that bountysource (and meanwhile also tip4commit) existed. I do not collect any repositories from Github but rather let the users manually submit a repo to Issue-Bidder. And at this point I think there is only one reason why bountysource does the opposite: For marketing reason – or better let's say this straight-out: the intention to make money. Guess what, the opensource community (speaking as a set of all specific communities) is a high potential and open market. Everybody is able to move mountains if you're ruthless enough. Let's just take this post on reddit as an example: http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/2dsvme/someone_stole_my_gpl_code_from_github_showing_it/ http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/2dsvme/someone_stol... and I'm sure tons of other example cases exist out there. In my opinion we can compare bountysource and all the other vultures out there with the financial brokers back in the 90' (why did I even set a filter to the 90' anyways?). Should we now all hate them? Or are we now just hating around because we are naive and didn't restrict all our repos and do believe in the positive aspects of this high potential market called opensource?

634 points by art2 12y ago

Ahh yes, the classic Bitcoiner approach of attempting to drive adoption simply by giving the damn things to people whether they want them or not.

nnnnni 12y ago
It's the Bitcoin Crusades!
randallsquared 12y ago
How awful! /s
- lotsofmangos 12y ago
  Kittens are nice, but I don't think they should be automatically posted to everyone. Not all of the time, anyway.
hokkos 12y ago
Like a drug dealer !
- wyck 12y ago
  More like a fraud artist.

josu 12y ago

Could somebody please provide some context?

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
ubernostrum 12y ago
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 balance was after the commit. And they insist that once a repository has been added to their system, they do not have the ability to remove it. This has legal and tax consequences they seem to be blissfully unaware of, and the best they'll offer is to stop sending you an email every time you make a commit. We (meaning the Django project) went a few rounds with them a while back and ultimately had to resort to threatening spam complaints against their ISP just to get the damn emails turned off. We still have been unable to get removed from the list of projects they "helpfully" collect donations for: https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/111 https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/111 The link in this thread is another major developer also attempting to get his repositories removed from their "service", and being stonewalled just as we were.
- colanderman 12y ago
  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.
  - Niksko 12y ago
    Sounds plausible. IANAL, but I know there are similar protections for somebody's likeness. As in, you're not allowed to use somebody's likeness to endorse a product without their consent. I can't see why the same wouldn't go for using somebody's trademark to endorse a product without the trademark owner's consent.
  - ubernostrum 12y ago
    Like I said, it's something I've investigated. Best I can tell as a non-attorney acting on advice from others, the way in which they advertise their services could be easily confused as implying a financial relationship with organizations or individuals with whom they do not have a (consenting) financial relationship. Where to go from there is an open question. The bigger question, as always with such things, is whether they cause enough annoyance to be worth lawyering them, and whether playing whack-a-mole -- since they're not the only "service" which does this -- would be a prudent way to spend time and money.

ubernostrum 12y ago

I 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 their ToS, but ultimately that wouldn't do anything except cause them to self-host their code and keep running the "service".

demetris 12y ago
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.
- csdrane 12y ago
  Not sure how the process works, but what about getting their domain added to Spamhaus's lists? [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spamhaus_Project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spamhaus_Project
- ubernostrum 12y ago
  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.
  - brador 12y ago
    Assuming you had the muscle, what's the worst a dev could theoretically hit them with? Could they be succesfully sued? DMCA?
    - tachion 12y ago
      You do realise that there is life and even entire civilizations outside of the USA, where DMCA holds no jurisdiction and the entire idea of suing becomes much more complicated? Especially when it seems from the GitHub discussion thread the tip4commit founder lives in a place where there is no regulations regarding what is a spam and what is not. ;)

linohh 12y ago

This 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).

danbruc 12y ago
I don't think it can have consequences - how would you justify punishing somebody for something somebody else did?
- sharpneli 12y ago
  In Finland all kickstarter style fundraisers are explicitly illegal, so is this. Basically any collection of money requires a special permit that is only handed to certain charitable causes etc. Otherwise it's paid work and has totally different rules governing it. In this case the person would have to prove that they're not involved with tip4commit. Quite likely the prosecutor would simply say that you're cheating and are trying to circumvent the law this way. Because how improbable it is that someone would collect money for you even if you wouldn't want to? So yeah. In some countries it might become a big problem.
  - danbruc 12y ago
    I don't think it would work out this way. Looking at tip4commit would make it quite clear that you don't have to be involved. And why would you have to prove that you are not involved instead of having the prosecutor prove the opposite? No not-guilty-until-proven in Finland?
    - sharpneli 12y ago
      Because they have been doing it before. Recently an exhibition called "Beer and Whiskey expo" was under threat due to it's name. Mention of Whiskey can be said to be an advertisement of strong alcohol. So they changed the name and it become just the Beer expo. After that they were informed that they will be denied permits unless individual bloggers with no connection to them would also remove mentions of Whiskey in their posts about the expo. In the end the individual bloggers removed the mentions to allow the exhibition to continue. Short description of what happened https://thriftyfinn.wordpress.com/2014/10/11/the-grand-whiskeygate-of-finland/ https://thriftyfinn.wordpress.com/2014/10/11/the-grand-whisk... for those who don't speak Finnish. So yeah. Actions of individuals whom you have no connection with can count against you here. Especially if the regulators think that you might be benefiting of them in some way, thus basically trying to cheat the system. Remember this. Not every country follows the "innocent until proven guilty" principle.

TomGullen 12y ago

If 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. Email spam is another good point, but if it was simply reduced to a one time email when you had accumulated $25 USD I don't see it as unreasonable. If they implemented the above I'd probably defend them. Right now not so much perhaps, micro cents of tips and lots of emails are understandably pretty annoying.

ubernostrum 12y ago
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.
- TomGullen 12y ago
  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.
  - ubernostrum 12y ago
    I have no problem with crowdfunded donation services... so long as the person/project the donations are being collected for has consented to it. I have a large problem with forcibly opting me and projects I work on into this, especially since some of those projects have donation mechanisms already, and an even bigger problem with no way to opt out once in. And I have a huge problem with the implication that I or those projects have any sort of relationship with tip4commit other than one of saying "please stop this" and getting back "no" over and over.

colanderman 12y ago

From the FAQ: > What happens to unclaimed tips (if recipient doesn't sign in and specify his/her bitcoin address)? Funds that are not claimed during 30 days get returned back to the project. Presumably "the project" in the answer refers to tip4commit? If so, isn't tip4commit committing fraud by advertising that tips go to the intended recipient, when in fact, if the recipient does not participate, they go into tip4commit's coffers? (Or is "the project" a mistake and should read "the donor"?)

pferdefleisch 12y ago
This is very similar to Readability's revenue model and you can see how that turned out. http://blog.readability.com/2012/06/announcement/ http://blog.readability.com/2012/06/announcement/
andrewstuart2 12y ago
I doubt it's a mistake. If you ask me, it's more likely that this is the whole goal of "the project."
- arsenische 12y ago
  > If you ask me, it's more likely that this is the whole goal of "the project." No, it is not. We just came with this idea for rails rumble competition, it was pretty spontaneous. Sorry if "to the project" sounds ambiguous, I meant "to the funded project" (not to tip4commit unless we are talking about tips to https://tip4commit.com/github/tip4commit/tip4commit https://tip4commit.com/github/tip4commit/tip4commit contributors).
michaelmior 12y ago
I assumed "the project" meant that the tip goes back into a general pool still dedicated to the particular project the tip was originally designated for. Then these funds would be available for redistribution when new commits are made to the project. I can see how "the project" could also be interpreted as tip4commit though and if that's the case, that's pretty lousy.

jedanbik 12y ago

This is gross to read because it's really about consent.

teamhappy 12y ago
I disagree. He explicitly consented to everybody doing whatever they want with the software. I just don't think it's fair to allow people to do one thing and then make them feel bad about it once they do it. --- Let me clarify a couple of things here so I don't have to write short replies to all of you. Let's start with the 3-clause-BSD license. It states that you aren't allowed to use the names of the contributors to endorse derived works. They don't do any of that so this is not an issue. Somebody brought up trademarks. If there's a trademark issue the legal situation should be clear and this issue should resolve itself in no time. Nobody likes lawsuits. I don't see how they violate any trademarks though. Somebody else brought up handles. This has always been an issue. It seems to boil down to if you like a project, it's okay for them to use somebody else's handle, if you don't, it's unacceptable. I don't think it's a good idea to build a moral argument on top of that. I'm pretty sure I'm guilty of this myself. The money/tax thing is very interesting. I really wouldn't know, but I don't think you can collect money on someone else's behalf. As in, it only becomes a tax issue/your money once you actually accept the money. If you're one of the people who think "GitHub should just shut these scumbags down" we might as well start shutting down political parties, newspapers and TV station we don't like. I don't want to live in a world like that. What upsets me the most is the fact that it becomes harder and harder to have a discussion about topics like this one. What's the point in having a discussion platform if everybody is expected to agree anyway? And even worse, if you don't immediately state that you don't support someone/something you're guilty by association somehow. I'm sad now. Please continue.
- ubernostrum 12y ago
  Armin tends to BSD-license his work. And the BSD license includes a provision which forbids use of contributor names for endorsement/promotion without permission. So, no, "consent" is not what Armin did. In fact, he did the opposite of that.

gerbal 12y ago

I'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.

waterlesscloud 12y ago
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.
- lotsofmangos 12y ago
  The Bitcoin exceptionalism is clear in this bit: ---- arsenische - 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? mitsuhiko - 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. arsenische - 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. --- From this it seems that not only do they think it avoids legal issues, but they do not consider publicly raising bitcoin to be a commercial project that needs lawyers or accountants.

sfk 12y ago

If 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.

matrix 12y ago
Agreed. This behavior is not benign "naughtiness" (as the YC guys like to encourage), it's parasitic exploitation of other people's hard work. Another group I'd lump in with this group is readthedocs.org
- freakboy3742 12y ago
  Why you put Read The Docs in the same category? RTD doesn't host anything unless you specifically set up an account and say you want to use them. They don't troll the web looking for projects, and hosting their docs whether they want them to or not.
- legutierr 12y ago
  readthedocs.org? How so?
  - matrix 12y ago
    I put readthedocs in the same category because they try to look like the original source of the documentation. They lift the content and style, lock stock and barrel, and then try to rank higher than the actual project's documentation pages. I have in the past, unwittingly read out-of-date documentation because it looked exactly like the source site, and I didn't pay close attention to the URL. If they were truly ethical, they would not try to impersonate the original sites. It fails one of the most basic tests for trademark infringement (which is, essentially: "might someone in a hurry mistake it for the real thing?").
    - woof 12y ago
      Keep on trollin'

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

scotty79 12y ago

So basically main point of opposition boil down to: 1. "Don't use my project name to collect money for me!" Why not use your project name? Did you trademarked it? If not, then it's just public information and you can't control how anyone chooses to use it. No one is collecting money for you. The guy just collects money and promises to give it to you if you ask. Until you ask it's his money. 2. "Don't spam!" Well, spamming is certainly in bad taste. I guess he just wanted to make sure people know that he will give them some money if they ask. Probably mistake on his part. 3. "There might be some laws against some of those things in some countries." So? There are countries that have laws that say that being gay is illegal. Nobody cares about all the laws. I think it illustrates that you should "do NOT as you would be done by" because you might have different tastes. Personally I'm all for free pennies and all possible schemes of bringing money to developers so they can do what they wan't instead of do what others tell them to do.

DanBC 12y ago
> No one is collecting money for you. The guy just collects money and promises to give it to you if you ask. Until you ask it's his money. Did you see the bit of US tax law helpfully posted elsewhere in the thread?
- scotty79 12y ago
  I just did. What a bizarre construct. Totally unenforceable. You'll get 'civil forfeiture'-d 50 times at random before IRS will charge you with that and wins. Besides it's not uncashed check. It's verbal (or even virtual) promise made by person in another country. If Nigerian prince offers you 500000$ you just need to claim do you have to pay taxes on that?
  - meepmorp 12y ago
    > I just did. What a bizarre construct. Totally unenforceable. Y Oh, well thank god for that. Whoever might have legal issues with this can just tell the relevant authorities in their country that scotty79 on HN says it's bizarre and totally unenforceable, and that'll shut them right up, won't it. And, also, hey who gives a shit if the people involved in the various projects want their project associated with this. If there's no legal means to prevent it, then it's 100% ok because there's no such thing as just respecting the wishes of the people involved and being a decent person. After all, those people for put their code out there in public, so they have it coming and fuck them if they don't like it. Can you seriously not see why people have a problem with this? And why it'd be good for the folks running the site to not automatically include whoever they please in their scheme, and to allow projects to remove themselves if asked?

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

brador 12y ago

My money is on the old Bitcoin play of "we were hacked" once they have a large enough balance of donations.

apendleton 12y ago
As someone else has already pointed out, they don't even have to pretend to get hacked to get to keep contributors' money. The model of dispensing 1% of balance per commit guarantees that it's impossible to get all of a project's contributions back out again.

naringas 12y ago

in a nutshell they're refusing to implement a blacklisting mechanism and being stubborn about it.

cookiecaper 12y ago
Since the project is open source itself, I wonder if they'd accept a pull request that implemented a blacklist.
- ahome1 12y ago
  That would be an interesting way to deal with the developer's response that he add one himself: "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."
- theonewolf 12y ago
  They actually claimed/stated that if you want these features, go code them yourself.
davesque 12y ago
Right, seems like it to me. This other stuff about the legitimacy of Bitcoin, taxation on uncollected payments, etc. seems a little over the top. However, I do think there's an interesting debate on the opt-in/opt-out issue. People are saying that Google itself is an opt-out system, but the "right to be forgotten" seems like a real concern to me.

Dewie 12y ago

I received a tip from tip4commit for a merged pull request to some github repository. The tip was too small to "cash out" on though, and I think I might have needed 40 or more tips like that in order to get a sum that was redeemable.

TallboyOne 12y ago

Wow, fuck that guy.

shangxiao 12y ago

I wanted to tell these guys that they remind me of the infuriating Comcast guy who refused to disconnect the customer's account, until I saw that somebody else felt the same way and had already told them.

pistle 12y ago

You know what really helps open source developers? Annoying them until they say f-it. Not only is os its own sort of challenge, but then you get a ghetto bitcoin angle going on it... and these tips sort of amount to shit. Big contributors (likely alternatively funded well beyond the tips) don't see much and small contributors get fuck all. And that unclaimed currency goes back to the "project?" Stop.

nakovet 12y ago

Maybe it's time for a LICENSE addendum? "Unless the services stated here, no money should be collect in the project behalf. "? I know it's not a good solution, but it's a solution, where you can file license violations wherever they host this project.

aidenn0 12y ago
IANAL but I don't think that would work unless tip4commit is using your software; otherwise they don't have to agree to your license.
- nakovet 12y ago
  Good catch, all they are using is the project name. =( I guess a license addendum would have no effect.

coldtea 12y ago

The best thing would be to get GitHub to close this scumbags down.

bhc 12y ago

I believe Flattr does something similar. They will accept donations on behalf of a YouTube channel (or Instagram, Soundcloud, etc.) whether the content creator opted in or not and release the fund when the creator claims his/her donations.

untitaker_ 12y ago
The key word is _similar_: Flattr doesn't send any unsolicited emails and doesn't actually collect money until it gets claimed. tip4commit does both.
imrehg 12y ago
Bountysource[1] seems to be even closer, not sure if that got any such complaints. [1]: https://www.bountysource.com/ https://www.bountysource.com/
- bhc 12y ago
  I think the issue here might be Bitcoin. Many sites that deal in Bitcoin get "hacked" and the balances disappear, allegedly into the site operators' pockets.
- gerbal 12y ago
  Bounty Source makes it pretty clear the bounties aren't from the project maintainers, and bounties aren't collected or solicited as if they are from or for the project maintainers..
MrUnderhill 12y ago
I was wondering about Flattr as well. You can connect your account to Github, and the owners of repos that you star will be "flattred". I've done this a few times, some that haven't been claimed yet too - I admit it never crossed my mind that it could be nothing but an inconvenience to the recipient.

roganartu 12y ago

The tip4commit website is vulnerable to Heartbleed: https://filippo.io/Heartbleed/#tip4commit.com https://filippo.io/Heartbleed/#tip4commit.com Don't sign in or register or you may have more to worry about than undesired tax liabilities. EDIT: It's fixed now.

brunoqc 12y ago
Did you tell them? EDIT: I did https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/147 https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/147
- WhoBeI 12y ago
  I'm sure he sent them a notification about their new account on his website on which, if they create an account, they may or may not find information of value to them.
arsenische 12y ago
Thank you very much! I am quite surprised because I remember fixing this issue in the same day patch became available and I run update recently. Upgrading the distro, hopefully it fixes the problem.
- apendleton 12y ago
  Upgrading the distro is likely insufficient, as your private key has potentially (likely, at this point) been compromised. At a minimum you need a new key and cert.

coldtea 12y ago

One useful exercize would be to read the "right to forget" thing within the frame of this exchange.

SchizoDuckie 12y ago

https://tip4commit.com/projects/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=popcorn&order=balance https://tip4commit.com/projects/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=... 4 project currently listed under popcorn time. Great, he just painted an extra bulls-eye on their heads beause now they're making money with the project. Food for lawyers.

jnbiche 12y ago

These kinds of episodes are making me increasingly depressed. On one hand, I'm incredibly disappointed in the ethics and morality of some of the people who have latched on to Bitcoin. And sadly, I'd have to include tip4commit in that group, particularly since they are "opt-out" and yet have been spamming people after each commit [ubernostrum points out below that they aren't even "opt-out", since they're not honoring opt out requests]. At best, it's poorly thought out. They may have good intentions, but they've implemented their intentions in a very sketchy manner. Completely unacceptable, and I understand people's anger. Bitcoin has attracted more than it's fair share of assholes, and I understand the frustration people have toward such people and companies. On the other hand, I'm even more saddened by the irrational hatred so many developers have for Bitcoin, who refuse to acknowledge that not everyone who is interested in Bitcoin is a scammer or lunatic. I have met some incredibly honest, generous, and kind individuals in the Bitcoin community. And the Bitcoin project holds such promise for the financial world, if it's not first destroyed by scammers, regulators, and close-minded developers. As just one example of what drew me to Bitcoin, Bitcoin holds (or used to hold) such tremendous promise for the developing world, and to people who are shut out of traditional banking. It's bitterly disappointing to me that so many people are intent on destroying Bitcoin because its implications are perceived to threaten their political beliefs, or because of some kind of jealousy toward the imagined wealth of earlier adopters. The contempt around here is palpable, and it's directed toward anyone associated with Bitcoin. The emotions here are so intense that we have HNers pulling out the DMCA, which is so hypocritical coming from certain people that I am left speechless. Can we please bear in mind that Bitcoin has many, many ethical, kind, honest developers and users, and that not everyone should be painted with this brush of contempt that some of you wield so recklessly. Bitcoin has the misfortune to have experienced an huge gain in price last winter, which drew in an inordinate number of scammers, opportunists, and speculators. We, the developers and users of Bitcoin, are not to blame for these types of dishonest people. Very often, we are their victims. If Bitcoin does fail, a large part of the blame will be one the shoulders of so many software and IT people who make a flash decision that Bitcoin was "tulips" or a "ponzi scheme", and who refused to change their minds in the face of evidence otherwise (like scores of established corporations choosing to accept Bitcoin). I actually worry now that some of my Bitcoin open source contributions in my real name will be held against me now. All my hard work building a great Github repo is going to be discounted because people see contributions to one or two Bitcoin projects in my "contributed to" Github section. The whole situation makes me sad beyond belief.

ayrx 12y ago

Even ignoring all the legal implications, it's pretty damn rude to reach out to people contributing to open source projects on their own free time without asking for anything in return and offer them a few measly dollars for hours of work.

milkyway 12y ago
That's what I hate about these "bitcoin tips". Should I act all surprised and glad when someone on reddit "tips" me 4 cents? Price of my time it takes me to "collect" that tip is higher than the tip itself, by factors.
jschwartzi 12y ago
In fact, this communicates entirely the wrong information about the value of their work. If I were looking to encourage people to work on open-source projects, I certainly wouldn't try to entice them with a pittance too small to even buy a pack of gum.
- ayrx 12y ago
  Exactly. As an active open source contributor I'll be very insulted if someone offers this to me without me opting in. If I want money I look for jobs or clients. Literally any other job in the world will pay more than this ever will. I'm not doing open source for the money.
scotty79 12y ago
I'd be delighted to receive even a dollar for the work I did for free. If an old lady gives you 0.50$ for carrying her groceries up the stairs you just take it to aprecciate her apprecciacion.

wheaties 12y ago

The Django project has done their complaint the right way. They asked to be removed, voiced the reason why and then have threatened to open a complaint to the email provider, Mandril, for unsolicited email, i.e. spam. See here: https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/111 https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/111 This is probably the tactic that people should use for sites that do email mining and unsolicited emails. Good for them.

sjs382 12y ago

Please send donations for the Django project directly to me. Once the donations accumulate to more than $3000, I will email the Django developers, requesting that they come get the donations. <whisper>And if the Django project doesn't come get the donations within 30 days, we don't tell you what happens to the donations. What happens to the money, if its not claimed, may (or may not) go against the wishes of yourself or the Django developers (that we're collecting money on behalf of, without permission). Also, sending these donations exposes the developers to serious legal consequences.</whisper>

lkrubner 12y ago

These "funding" schemes keep popping up in different contexts. Journalism attracted a bunch of these schemes 5 to 10 years ago. Consider what Mike Krahulik said about Kachingle: "you can't just start collecting money for me without some kind of deal." http://webcomictweets.com/detail/tweet/138771362931163136 http://webcomictweets.com/detail/tweet/138771362931163136 Kachingle was an extreme case, gathering "donations" for sites like Wikipedia, Google News, and also small sites like Mike Krahulik's. Using this approach on Github is just a new variation on an old scam. As someone else said in that same thread: "that is the weirdest creepiest business model ever."

aaronmusk 12y ago
who says there is a business model behind this?

untilHellbanned 12y ago

Bitcoin subreddit thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2kz9x0/please_remove_mitsuhiko_this_guy_is_complaining/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2kz9x0/please_remov...

art2 12y ago

What is staggering is that one would assume that this service was created with the aim of helping open source developers, but when the developers ask personally to make a reasonable change to how the site is functioning, the owners decline. So the reason the site exists is something different. I don't think it's fraud. It's probably the weird culture of the (younger) part of the Bitcoin community, for whom the Bitcoin is more like cultural revolution. It's hard to rationally explain why liking Bitcoin leads to liking tip4commit's approach, but surely the Bitcoin revolutionists like to place themselves above the rest, and don't see themselves as a part of the "old" world (legal, financial system etc.). For example, the currently highest-voted comment on /r/bitcoin for the story [0] says "I disagree with him [mitsuhiko]". [0] http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2kz9x0/please_remove_mitsuhiko_this_guy_is_complaining/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2kz9x0/please_remov...

mbesto 12y ago
I think it's fair to say that the vocal majority of BitCoiners have a very naive view of some basic economic concepts.
- WallWextra 12y ago
  Also that they like ramming it down everyone's throats.
  - techrat 12y ago
    Given the value of BitCoin relies on desire and the only way they can possibly convince people that they want BitCoin is to spam it until they believe it...
- wyager 12y ago
  >a very naive view of some basic economic concepts. Which concepts in particular are you referring to?
  - shiven 12y ago

eof 12y ago

I'm really, really surprised and confused by what seems to be the overall sentiment here. This tipping project was born of a hackathon combining cryptocurrency (cool) and supporting open source projects. Awesome! Then when people started getting tipped tiny amounts it generated spam... annoying, but it was fixed. It's a bit outrageous to claim that emailing someone after they have received free money (over some threshold) to invite them to accept it is going over the line. Claims about taxes, etc.. are laughable. HOW DARE YOU GIVE ME FREE MONEY AND ALLOW ME TO DECLINE IT. Give me a break. Overall the tone of alexanderz is extremely reasonable. It is not clear to me why the equivalent of a social-site invite being emailed on behalf of some user is suddenly worth getting angry and talking about international spam law. Especially when the exact same opt-out functionality exists. Click one button and never seen another email.. what's the deal here.

maxerickson 12y ago
I guess the aspect you aren't addressing is that people feel like a listing on the site creates an association between the site and their project (quoting from the bug report I do not want to be associated with this kind of thing.). You can disagree about whether the listing implies an association and disagree that such an association is a bad thing, but it should be clear enough that there are people who do think it creates an association and that they do not want that appearance.
- eof 12y ago
  fair. It seems 'opt-out' is fine to me though and here is why: I want to contribute to some persons tiny little 4-stars github project because it saved my ass.. it is a bit audacious for long-tail repos to be signing up to accept tips; but sometimes my long-tail tip will cross her long-tail repo. Even more, what does mitsuhiko care if other people are getting money for contributions to his repos. If mitsuhiko is getting spam or seeing stuff in his issue queue despite opting out; that is a serious breach of ettiquite. It doesn't seem to me this is the case though.. it's like he is angry that other people are getting emails?
  - 12y ago

drivingmenuts 12y ago

In theory, I can association anyone with tip4commit just by searching for their project by name/project, correct?

hayd 12y ago

"each new commit receives 1% of available balance" So if you put a dollar in the account, even after 100 commits there's still 36 cents leftover (assuming every commit is "claimed"). Which is to say, by construction most of this money is going to remained unclaimed.

GhotiFish 12y ago
that's true, seems like there should be a way for funds to be exhausted at some point, and it could lead to a bit of spam.

aaronmusk 12y ago

It's a bit sad and annoying to see educated people with uneducated opinions on something that is as clear as my command line. The guys are not impersonating anyone nor taking any money from anyone. Google is opt-out tool and I don't see anyone complaining. There is absolutely nothing wrong with people bringing extra attention to someone's project and if contributors are going to make money in the process, that's epic. Yes, they probably should have emailed contributors less often but they've fixed it. Instead of complaining, come up with ideas to make it better... in the end, that's what this kind of community should be all about. BTW, get your ego's checked... seems like it's a bit inflated... and if you are going to sue anyone, think about your federal income tax... because that money is actually stolen from you :P

DanBC 12y ago
> Google is opt-out tool and I don't see anyone complaining. I see plenty of people complaining. That's why "Right to be forgotten" has so much traffic in EU. > Instead of complaining, come up with ideas to make it better People have suggested ways to make it better. The project has ignored them.

GhotiFish 12y ago

could someone explain the problem me? I'm not 100% on this service, and I'm not sure I follow the issues here (are they skimming from donations? Is that the problem? Most charities do...) he says tip4commit is profiting off their project, but, it seems like they're just storing the money till the dev claims it, if he wants it. Alternatively, what if I were to hypothetically state the following?: I will give the dev who contributes a pull requests that fixes this issue: https://github.com/mitsuhiko/flask/issues/1092 10 dollars. Have I commited an unfair act? Have I violated mitsuhiko in some way? Is the dev that claims this 10 dollars immoral? is mitsuhiko harmed? I am honestly assuming I'm missing the intricacies here. Could someone explain?

DanBC 12y ago
Some countries have strict rules about soliciting or collecting donations. People in those countries want to avoid the small possibility of legal trouble. They want to opt out of the project. The project refuses to allow any form of optout. This means that some people in some countries may have to sepnd time (and this money) talking to police and explaining what's going on. Dumping this time + cost burden on someone else when they have specifically asked to avoid it is sub-optimal. As an example of a group who were interviewed by police and who had to explain that their local group was not soliciting donations - the US parent group was: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8543640 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8543640 There was another problem which has since been fixed. The project would send out an email when a tip had been donated, even when it was a tiny donation and even if the receiver was not able to withdraw that tip. This is unsolicited and probably bulk and thus meets the treshold for spam. Finally it's not really clear what happens to the money. Say you're involved in $OpenSourceProject. Now imagine I donate a few US cents (but in bitcoin) to GhotiFish for a commit you made to $OpenSourceProject and you never collect it. This thread uas clarified that the money goes into a pool for $OpenSourceProject. But what if they never collect it? Tl:dr get permission from people before you use their name or project-names in your stuff.
- GhotiFish 12y ago
  Well all that is fair, the devil definitely is in the details here. I can empathise with the reasons to avoid opt out for them, if they view themselves as a transparent third party, then their perspective would be the same as the suggestion I put forward. That people are putting their money towards a project by their own volition. From that perspective, there's nothing the owner can do about it but ask people not to do it. My post was made before I had gone through the bulk of text in this discussion, so I can see the issue there. I have to agree with all your points, but your conclusion and ours are different. Despite the complications, I don't see why a projects head have an innate right to prevent donations to that projects developers. I keep seeing this sentiment come up over and over. I do disagree with that. Thanks for summarizing the issues!

grkvlt 12y ago

I really don't understand the hate and anger that seems to be being directed at the developer, in particular the constant stream of assertions that the project is a scam, fraudulent, and created with the intent of cashing out with everyone's donations after pretending to be 'hacked'. It seems like this sort of accusation is more likely to be a cause for legal action _by_ @arsenische rather than the flimsy pretexts for legal action _against_ them. The developer seems to have created this during a hackathon as a fun little project demonstrating what can be achieved using the GitHub APIs and Bitcoin; I'm quite impressed at the end result, to be honest. I don't have any real need for the service, since my employer pays for me to work on open source projects anyway, but if I was wanting to raise beer money from a side-project I don't see any reason not to consider it. As for the opt-in mechanism, it looks like they have resolved most of the issues, and many of the complainants have never interacted with the project until reading about it here - the number of complaints about SPAM and assertions of illegality are amazing, all from people who have never received an email from tip4commit. These days it seems laughable to complain about unsolicited email - perhaps it was a problem in the days of USENET when messages cost real money to deliver over expensive leased lines and dial-up connections, but today with filtering and cheap bandwidth it makes no sense...

gnud 12y ago
The outright refusal to de-list projects makes this seem very suspicious. It makes it seem like they want to capitalize on well-known oss projects, and more or less trick people into giving money, when there's no clear entity behind the service and no clear rules about what happens with "unclaimed" money. The two obvious explanations here are "scam" and "thoughtless developers". In either case, I wouldn't want any project I was associated with, listed on their page.

CHY872 12y ago

Here's an interesting one. They only email contributors when they have over 0.005 BTC sitting around. So any contributor who over their lifetime is donated less than 0.005 BTC is never told that the money has been given to them. So we can reasonably expect that almost all the money put into this service will end up sitting around and not going to the people it's supposed to help.

msiemens 12y ago

Fun fact: mitsuhiko also asked a fork of Tip4Commit to remove his projects. Now their page states [1]: > This project has been disabled. It doesn't accept donation and it will not distribute tips. > Reason: Project author request: https://github.com/sigmike/peer4commit/issues/110 https://github.com/sigmike/peer4commit/issues/110 On the other hand, Tip4Comment has only this notice [2]: > Project maintainers have decided not to notify new contributors about tips and they probably don't like this way of funding. [1]: http://prime4commit.com/projects/129 http://prime4commit.com/projects/129 [2]: https://tip4commit.com/github/mitsuhiko/flask https://tip4commit.com/github/mitsuhiko/flask

DonHopkins 12y ago

Oh, no: now all we need is for ISIS to start using tip4commit to contribute to open source projects, and we'll be living in a South Park episode.

twa927 12y ago

A few things I found about tip4commit by searching through reddit: - 4 months ago Bitcoin Core was happy to raise 1.8BTC in two days using tip4commit [0], but today's comment [1] signals they are not happy with tip4commit, because it encourages submitting large number of small commits - an IT World article about 40% donations being unclaimed [2] (1.384BTC) - "we discovered a security breach" [3] - OpenBazaar, a fork of Dark Market, a market for drugs, encourages to make donations using tip4commit [4] - "Tip4Coin donations look like they are stolen" [5] Unfortunately it looks like a typical Bitcoin project - naivety of the authors, in terms of technical and legal matters, plus douchebag attitude (ignoring others, even if they are owners of things they profit from), plus shady entities benefiting from them. [0] http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2993ja/good_news_everyone_since_june_25th_we_have_raised/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2993ja/good_news_ev... [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2kzlsh/tip4commit_spammy_as_fuck/clq7fyn http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2kzlsh/tip4commit_s... [2] http://www.itworld.com/article/2693360/cloud-computing/linus-torvalds-and-other-developers-are-leaving-bitcoins-on-the-table.html http://www.itworld.com/article/2693360/cloud-computing/linus... [3] http://imgur.com/Qd6EPZ7 http://imgur.com/Qd6EPZ7 [4] http://www.reddit.com/r/DarkNetMarkets/comments/27bdlo/its_coming_drug_auctions_on_openbazaar/ http://www.reddit.com/r/DarkNetMarkets/comments/27bdlo/its_c... [5] http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/20bvau/tip4coin_donations_look_like_they_are_stolen/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/20bvau/tip4coin_don...

gnud 12y ago
There's also the small matter of their fee [0][1], which I do not see mentioned anywhere on their landing page. [0] http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2kzlsh/tip4commit_spammy_as_fuck/clq9cl3 http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2kzlsh/tip4commit_s... [1] https://tip4commit.com/projects/914/deposits https://tip4commit.com/projects/914/deposits

Tehnix 12y ago

I don't really see a problem with this, and feel it's been blown waaaaaaay bigger than it should have been. They even included "We are not affiliated with most of the projects, their owners might not endorse use of tip4commit." at the bottom of their frontpage.

arsenische 12y ago

First, I want to apologize. We have received a lot of negative feedback suddenly and I can assure you that we take it seriously. I temporary disabled ALL the email notifications (even though I don't think they were a real problem) and added a warning that we are not affiliated with project owners. When my teammate is online he will probably also some of the other issues. I see a lot of misinformation about tip4commit and our intentions. I can't quickly respond to everybody, but I'll try to keep basic answers here: https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/wiki/FAQ https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/wiki/FAQ Perhaps some people just misunderstand the project and hate it. Also I think that it is normal that developers try to understand the motivation of users and ask questions in order to find a better solution, please don't take it as offence or reluctance to change. We are going to resolve every issue or close the project. Btw, if you think this project shouldn't exist - welcome to https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/157 https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/157 - that could be the easiest solution for all of us. If you believe the project can be improved - welcome to leave your feedback on the desired improvements, such as https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/152 https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/152 and https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/154 https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/154 or others. Thanks for reading this and please accept apologies if we offended you (never wanted to).

kancer 12y ago
I don't know if this happens often but I would like to take a moment and point out that after hearing a strong negative reaponse, It's nice to see that the developer is willing to work through the problems with the community to change his/her project to a better state.
- stfp 12y ago
  Yup, points and kudos to them for engaging with users/critics. OTOH, still negative infinite points for even arguing when a maintainer comes in and asks to opt out.
sjs382 12y ago
>> Btw, if you think this project shouldn't exist - welcome to https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/157 https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/157 - that could be the easiest solution for all of us. The project should be opt-in or shouldn't exist at all.

BuckRogers 12y ago

1 of 2 fixes needed here. 1. Unclaimed money is never processed/withdrawn from the donor 2. Opt-in only That's it.

mjuchli 12y ago

I started a project called Issue-Bidder (https://issue-bidder.com/ https://issue-bidder.com/) with the same concept before I even knew that bountysource (and meanwhile also tip4commit) existed. I do not collect any repositories from Github but rather let the users manually submit a repo to Issue-Bidder. And at this point I think there is only one reason why bountysource does the opposite: For marketing reason – or better let's say this straight-out: the intention to make money. Guess what, the opensource community (speaking as a set of all specific communities) is a high potential and open market. Everybody is able to move mountains if you're ruthless enough. Let's just take this post on reddit as an example: http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/2dsvme/someone_stole_my_gpl_code_from_github_showing_it/ http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/2dsvme/someone_stol... and I'm sure tons of other example cases exist out there. In my opinion we can compare bountysource and all the other vultures out there with the financial brokers back in the 90' (why did I even set a filter to the 90' anyways?). Should we now all hate them? Or are we now just hating around because we are naive and didn't restrict all our repos and do believe in the positive aspects of this high potential market called opensource?