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Comment by zoobert | Hacker News Reader

I am the developer of Gmvault (http://www.gmvault.org) an open source tool having its development hosted on github (https://github.com/gaubert/gmvault). I really like the idea of crowd funding and would like my tool to be founded like that if possible as I would like it to be open source and available to anybody while providing enough money to run the development server. I even more like to idea of having bounties on bugs as this would help me prioritizing features and bug fixes while funding the development.

However since the release of the tool in may I had around 20000 downloads but less the 20 persons supported the development by donating something. I still hope that having such a facility directly embedded in Github would allow people to be a bit more philanthropic and rewarding for the developers as often developers would probably want to continue full time the adventure of developing a product or a library.

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What if I gave you $150,000? Would you make the product to my specifications? Does this illustrate why this could be a channel to disrupt the spirit of open source software?

Imagine Github does implement this. Now you have a bunch of coders who want to work on "open source" projects for money, hoping to get backers as if they did a Kickstarter project. Or maybe it could start an OSS Github "gold rush."

Now that we have a bunch of money-hungry developers, it'd be pretty easy to de-rail or commandeer projects simply by donating a large portion of money. Now imagine a non OSS competitor starts contributing. Multiple things can happen:

1) Any innovation or development of features could be easily copied and incorporated into competitive projects for sale.

2) A developer gets "hooked" on that donation money and starts favoring the large donors' requests over others.

3) These requests could sabotage the quality or the focus of the project.

4) The donor could pull funding at this point and collapse development and support of the project.

Full blown conspiracies aside, the whole point of OSS was to open up development for everyone to grow and learn, and to remove software development from the corruptible influence of money.

I think others on this thread had a great idea, make it a "tip", and make it anonymous. We would still have to limit "tips" because anyone can make a huge tip and then e-mail a "ransom" letter to the developers to do stuff if they want to continue getting large tips. The previous ordered list applies here.

Again, I'm going to an extreme and likely this sort of abuse wouldn't be rampant in a system like that. But involving money at all directly into the process sounds like it could do more harm than good.

If you want to take donations, you can do a Kickstarter to get up and running and then take some sort of "beer" or micropayment service on your website. Github integrating this into their offering seems irresponsible to the OSS community at large.

and to remove software development from the corruptible influence of money.

What? I've been part of the F/OSS world in one capacity or another for something like 15 years now, and I've never heard anybody posit that before. Yes, some F/OSS advocates are somewhat anti-commercial, but to say that "the point" of OSS is about removing the influence of money, is a pretty novel idea from what I can see.

Consider this: The FSF specifically say, in the GPL FAQ[1], that you can charge money for GPL'd programs. The Open Source Definition (OSD)[2] has as it's first plank:

"The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale."

And programmers employed by various corporations contribute a significant amount of code to the ASF, and to the Linux kernel, etc. Look at the Apache OOo proposal[3], for example, and now how many of the initial committers were from IBM or Red Office.

[1]: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html

[2]: http://www.opensource.org/osd.html/

[3]: http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/OpenOfficeProposal

Thanks for the information. I admit I'm not fully versed. I don't know much about enterprise OSS, but I do know that IBM created Eclipse as a way to get people onto their development tools and Java technology. Not to say that's even a bad thing (although I'm no fan of Eclipse but thats irrelevant), just that I guess I don't want to see things like Github motivated by money, when its worked so damn well without it.

What I don't want to see is programmers begging for "donations" so they can work on their project. Clearly my example was a little overblown, but if its not broken why fix it?

Thanks for the info though - as I'm sure I'm not the only one that learned from it.

> the whole point of OSS was to open up development for everyone to grow and learn, and to remove software development from the corruptible influence of money

That's sort of begging the question: "Will money disrupt OSS development? Well, yes of course, because the point of OSS is to prevent the corruptible influence of money."

Lots of people working on OSS projects do so while on somebody's payroll, and they don't seem to derail those projects as a matter of course.

You point out a valid use-case. I think they fall into a couple of different categories:

1) Developers build OSS components that solve a larger business need for the organization. The fact they could modularize it and make it generic enough for open consumption is intrinsic motivation on part of the developer. In this case the "somebody" who is paying them doesn't really care about the OSS, just that they solve the larger task.

2) People build OSS projects on their own time, while working for someone else.

3) Someone is contracted or paid to build a solution for someone. Turns out it would be great OSS, and is given away for free afterwards. The contracting party is essentially paying for the development.

4) Then theres the case you point out. Where people pay others to explicitly build OSS, which I could be wrong but I don't see that happening that often, outside of maybe Redhat or something.

I disagree, OSS removes the corrupting influence of patents and copyright, not the influence of money. Plenty of OSS is made for money and yet the ecosystem hasn't collapsed. All four of your doomsday scenarios are possible today and yet the ecosystem thrives. #1 is actually a good thing, it means that more high quality open source software is distributed.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

I agree with you, but I think you shouldn't have used the word "money-hungry developers". It's a bit too harsh IMO.

How is it harsh? I'm simply saying it would introduce a population of developers to Github that previously didn't participate and are only doing so because they can make money from it.

I agree with your cons but would ask if pros of that system outweigh cons?

I'm going to quote Biggie on this one: "The more money we come across, the more problems we see."

@zoobert Do you know about Gittip?

https://www.gittip.com/github/gaubert/

No but I do know. Thanks. As said below bounties on bugs is a fantastic idea.

That's my point. I usually end up with incomplete things because of lack of any incentive.

Bounties on bugs is a GREAT idea

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