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Comment by Sir_Cmpwn | Hacker News Reader

As someone who does not want BountySource involved in their open source projects, I applaud GitHub for this move. IMO BountySource is a borderline bad actor. It was a pain in the ass to get them to remove my projects from their platform and then they only "sort of" did.

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Since reading comprehension is apparently a challenge:

Accusation

> IMO BountySource is a borderline bad actor.

Elaboration

> It was a pain in the ass to get them to remove my projects from their platform and then they only "sort of" did.

Sir_Cmpwn has no further obligation to elaborate even further on the detail given, though there might be a benefit to explaining what "'sort of' did" means.

Edit: looks like he did here anyway -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15748433

Elaboration is more of a quantitative thing than qualitative, though. It's always possible to elaborate further, and there's no harm in asking to do so. And I found that his further elaboration was helpful:

"I could also clarify that BountySource is opt-out: by default they're accepting bounties for projects that did not agree to having a bounty program."

I originally assumed you had to register your project on BountySource, and they were just making it difficult to de-register something that had already been added.

Making this thing opt-out only, and apparently making opting out difficult, is really bad behavior, and I completely agree with his characterization.

I'm not sure I got all that. Could you elaborate further, please?

Would you care to elaborate on "borderline bad actor"?

I did, in my original comment, immediately following the accusation.

Do you mind linking to it? I tried digging through your comment history to find it and couldn't.

Is this a joke? The third parent of your comment.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15747940

He said ELABORATE, "to develop or present in detail". Your explanation for them being a "borderline bad actor" is sparse to say the least.

To which MadcapJake responded "Would you care to elaborate", and you responded "I did, in my original comment, immediately following the accusation." I assumed that meant you had made some other comment earlier that explains your complaint in more detail. Did you mean by that that you had just edited your original comment?

I'd really like to hear some more detail. I've not heard of BountySource before today, I thought you could go into detail on what you had to do to get your stuff off their site and whatnot.

I wrote additional context here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15748433

>what you had to do to get your stuff off their site and whatnot.

File GitHub issues that went nowhere, then follow up with a dragged out email thread which ended in bounties being disabled but my projects still showing up on their site.

Can you elaborate (via an edit, because probably HN won't let you post new replies now), on why you want bountysource to not be involved with your project at all? The desire to not have them involved is what we thought you meant by "bad actor", and we didn't realise that by "bad actor" you meant that they wouldn't remove you when you asked.

Sure. I didn't want them in my projects for reasons that varied from project to project. Sometimes it was that I did not want money involved in the culture of some of my smaller projects. At other times it was because the overhead of dealing with bounties would be counterproductive to the project, since it was likely to lead to low-value contributions that fulfill a bounty but are not up to the level of quality that the project demands of its contributions. "What do you mean you won't accept this patch? It was paid for by a dozen users!" For one of my projects, we have an internal bounty program which I am more effectively able to exercise a greater degree of control over and make the terms more clear about upfront.

None of this is why a bad actor, it's just why it's a bad fit for my projects (and to be honest, many others). Why they're a "borderline bad actor" is what I said earlier:

>It was a pain in the ass to get them to remove my projects from their platform and then they only "sort of" did.

I could also clarify that BountySource is opt-out: by default they're accepting bounties for projects that did not agree to having a bounty program.

In what ways is BountySource a "bad actor"?

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