Comment by mnx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mnx | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Interesting, but they should make it more clear how does it work legally - i.e. are there guarantees built in that the repo owner won't discard the pull request, and then use the code anyway? Especially on open-source projects. Is this purely reputation based? Seems like it could be done with proper licensing. Also, the line

  >If you're not happy with their progress though, you can unassgin them
 and then other developers will be able to grab it again.

Worries me a little. Is there no limit, no appeal process? you could be 80% done with a task, and then the repo owner decides they don't want it done anymore, and just ditch you?

The idea here, since we don't want to make it a competition or something where only one wins the jackpot, that if a lazy dev takes the job, and he's behind schedule, or provides a low quality deliverance, then the client can unassign. I here your concerns but I hope it won't grow into a backdoor for stealing code.

Builds backdoor for stealing code... hopes it won't grow into a backdoor for stealing code.

Not entirely fair. A lot of good things have worked on the honor system, as long as fair thought has gone into the "rules" of the system so that enough easy, edge case abuse scenarios are protected against. A big one that comes to my mind was the gaming league, CAL, back in the day. It was 100% honor system based, with a target audience that was known to be hackers, liars, and in general kids - yet it worked!

Paying upfront also implements the honor system.

So (effectual or not) attempts to protect consumers from developers not delivering. What symmetric mechanisms do you have in mind to protect developers? How are you handling copyright assignment, which should really wait until payment has cleared?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com