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Comment by ubernostrum | Hacker News Reader

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".

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How can there be taxation consequences unless you act to set up a bitcoin address and accept the offered tip? If you've done all that, I think it's clear you know what you're doing. If you don't do that, then the money (apparently?) returns to the project you committed to, from whence it came.

The only way there could be tax is if you receive the money, and that can only happen by you deliberately becoming involved.

People have legitimate reasons to avoid messing with BTC or others. Some people don't even want to hassle with currencies beyond their own.

Even if they oblige in accepting BTC and just convert it to their preferred currency, they'd be forced to go through the process of signing up and verifying with some sort of exchange. What if they don't want to do business with those institutions, or share their financial details to yet another third-party? Cryptocurrencies will succeed, thankfully, but some people don't want to put their toes in those legal waters yet. They will also have to spend more time administering to local laws and taxes regarding donations, which eats away the time they have for other much more fun things.

Nobody is being forced to accept the money, and therefore nobody is being forced to interact with bitcoin. The money is there if they want to claim it. If not, no problem, they can just ignore it in which case it doesn't affect them.

Would the project be sustainable, or more fair, if it allowed project maintainers to whitelist currencies, and manage that integration for them? That seems more appropriate and follows the the spirit of giving that the project encourages.

Tip4commit using USD? Bitcoin is hasslefree. If you want tip4commit to use USD or gold or any other silly thing - go for it. Clone tip4commit, put all integration in place, see payment systems eating 30-40% of your donations.

OK, so yes. We agree that it is unsustainable if the effort is put forth to make your product actually convenient for the volunteers whose shoulders you sit on.

Meanwhile you insult us by simply saying "fork it." That doesn't get money donated on my behalf out of your Bitcoin wallet. I suggest y'all stop bickering and actually start helping. The burden to clean up your oversights is on no one but yourself.

We know you built the project in good faith, but it needs serious tweaks. At this point you're being a nuisance, at best, to the very creators of projects your site is deployed upon! If they were in your situation they would have fixed this, shipped it, and have written a detailed postmortem by now.

I feel like we shouldn't miss the point here: you can't impersonate me and take donations in my name without my consent, no matter the currency (or regulations or whatever) being used. Make it opt-in, not "opted in by default and no way to opt out".

We don't impersonate anybody. We just provide additional way to reward project's contributors and perhaps attract more of them. We'll make it more explicit with https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/136

Firstly, you need to make abundantly obvious and clear promises as to what happens to money left it accounts. There is no reason to trust your escrow, let alone your ability to manage or secure it. I honestly still can't find it spelled out clearly, and even then it'd be hard to trust.

I suggest you pull your site before this PR gets even further out of hand, then reboot. If you continue to pursue your project, partner with a couple projects that opt-in (free publicity for you both) and work to their needs. Once you have things in order, then you can think about something more automated.

Consider this: you are in a high-tax country and have some incoming lucrative income. Instead of receiving that income and paying the tax, the company sends you an email saying: Here's a $100,000, come get if you want, but you don't have to! It's a tip! It'll get donated to MSF in a few years. Wink, wink. You put in your income for the year as $0 (not having accepted this tip), and leave for the Seyschelles, where suddenly you come upon this email (you didn't check your Spam folder until then) and claim your now tax-free $100,000.

Sure, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_avoidance . Various strategies to reduce income in one year or jurisdiction and apply it to another are widespread, and I'm not sure why this would be different. I am not a lawyer, though.

The "It's a tip!" nature of this seems irrelevant to taxes: either you accept it or you don't, and if you do, you may or may not be required to pay taxes on it, depending on laws that are applied to you.

in the US the key event is when the income becomes available to you, not when you collect it.

The proper thing to do in your hypothetical case (where you didn't see the message until well into the next tax year) would be to file an amended return for the previous year declaring the recently discovered income.

> How can there be taxation consequences unless ...

Tax? Perhaps not, but the OP was talking about tax and other legal consequences. These can vary wildly from country to country.

My local legislation requires applying for a permit before asking for donations. If a 3rd party would add my projects to this website, I could face criminal charges and the proof of burden would be on me.

you say 'before _collecting_ donations'. just don't _collect_ if you don't want to.

soliciting contributions in UK. Moot point as to how someone else soliciting a contribution on your behalf without your permission is seen.

I think that people who set Web services up really need to think about what territory the service is designed to operate in and which legal system(s) they have the time and resources to examine.

we are not collecting or soliciting a contribution on someone's behalf.

Could you add a few more words to explain your interpretations of those terms in practice here?

The rest of the folks in the thread and on the Github issue are exploring what those terms mean. I'm not seeing you provide much insight or rationale into your interpretations beyond a simple "No, we are not."

How are we failing to make clear the reasons behind the reaction to your work?

How are we failing to make clear the various suggestions for making your work actually useful instead of potentially harmful to the projects you claim to be trying to help?

In the face of my local legislation, you are. That would mean trouble for me.

I might buy that you're not soliciting contributions on someone's behalf, at least in a razor-thin distinction kind of way.

But as much as I try to contort it, I can't see how you aren't accepting a contribution on someone's behalf.

"Donate bitcoins to open source projects or make commits and get tips for it."

"How does it work?

People donate bitcoins to projects. When someone's commit is accepted into the project repository, we automatically tip the author."

from here - https://tip4commit.com/

---

Yes you are.

I should have said: you need permit before asking for donations (corrected in GP). As I said, if my projects were listed on this site, I could face criminal charges, regardless whether any money ever changes hands.

What? You live in a country where someone can use your name in a fund-raiser without your approval or authorization and you will face criminal charges with presumption of guilt?

Some project on github is not even remotely your biggest problem here.

> What? You live in a country where someone can use your name in a fund-raiser without your approval or authorization and you will face criminal charges with presumption of guilt?

It's extremely unlikely that I could get convicted because of it, very unlikely that they'd even start the case either. But it would at least mean significant paperwork and other nuisance.

It's not like I'd get sent to Siberia but yeah, my country is full of stupid laws. And so are many other countries.

Actually I do think the intent of this law is good and it's to protect individuals from scams. But the practice should be updated to better work with crowdfunding and other Internet fundraisers.

Here's a similar example from earlier this year, the local police demanded that local Wikimedia foundation chapter explain their fundraising campaign.

http://yle.fi/uutiset/finnish_police_examine_wikipedias_fund...

The local Wikimedia chapter had no part to play in it, were not charged in the end, but had to spend time and effort explaining that it's the California-based US entity asking for the donations.

>>What? You live in a country where someone can use your name in a fund-raiser without your approval or authorization and you will face criminal charges with presumption of guilt?

The point is that, because there isn't a way to opt-out of the project, it is the responsibility of the tip4commit developers to do their due diligence and make sure they aren't putting anyone in hot waters with their project.

Not only have they not done that, they're also being indignant assholes about it.

If they changed it to opt-in, I would think the whole problem would go away.

edit: clarification

I would qualify as living in such a country: the USA.

Some unfortunate medical issues put me on disability, which means living off of SSDI for a while. For various reasons the social security programs in this country are run with a focus on "stopping fraud" instead of "helping people", regardless of little shrinkage and waste actually exists.

A consequence of this is that you are required to be "in need" which is usually defined as not having more than like $30 in cash to your name. This includes all possible recoverable sources modulo a few enumerated items (such as one cheap car). As part of the application process, I had to liquidate stuff like the $70 i had in a "mandatory contribution" retirement account from a short-lived tech support job I had when I was an undergrad. Of course, as this was WAY before you were supposed to withdraw that money, it came with penalties that made that ~$70 worth only about $10. That was still considered "recoverable".

I have some stuff up on github. At the moment, none of it is very interesting or worthy of any tip. I suspect that for now the IRS/H&HS hasn't even heard of this kind of income. They certainly are not currently looking at potential income sources this new and unusual. That could change in time.

Regardless of the probably-low actual risk, I would be required to liquidate this kind of tip right now if any existed. Failure to do so could cause cancel my SSDI. That loss could even be retroactive back to the date the tip was sent.

I have no idea how this would play out in practice. It might not be as problematic as I described. What I do know is that social security moves by the whim of politicians and bureaucrats, making the entire topic very hard to predict. So yes, someone using my name in a fund-raiser can not only cause "tax issues", it also caries a (probably-)small but very real risk of removing my only source of income (aka "rent", "food").

No, these rules are not sane (or useful). Yes, this is a big problem, that is much larger than github. Unfortunately, the potential risk to anybody in a situation like mine is still very real.

To take some examples:

* In some countries it is illegal to opt someone into services they didn't ask for.

* In some countries it is illegal to send unsolicited emails about services.

* In some countries it is illegal to accept or solicit donations without registering first with tax authorities.

* In some countries it is illegal to suggest a financial relationship between yourself and another person/entity when no such relationship exists.

* In some countries it is illegal to pay out to people without also filing tax documents to track the payment and provide the recipient with records they legally are required to keep.

etc., etc.

Their track record when confronted by people who have issues with some/all of the above is not encouraging. They appear to me to be putting far too much faith in "we're doing BitCoin on the internet" as a magic shield against laws, and they do not appear to have ever talked to anyone who knows even the tax or service laws of even major countries in which the developers they solicit on "behalf" of live (evidenced by comments from them that they are too small to afford lawyers).

Which one of those examples were "taxation consequences" when someone didn't accept the tip?

They sound like lots of issues the tip4commit people have to fix/solve/etc, but not the opted-in repo maintainers, which was the point of the GP.

    > In some countries it is illegal to opt someone into services they didn't ask for.

Nope. You are not a part of service unless you accept the tip.

    > In some countries it is illegal to send unsolicited emails about services.

True that. This should probably be fixed.

    > In some countries it is illegal to accept or solicit donations without registering first with tax authorities.

Donation does not exist unless you accept that bitcoin. This is not a problem of tip4commit. It's a problem between country and it's tax resident.

    > In some countries it is illegal to suggest a financial relationship between yourself and another person/entity when no such relationship exists.

Once again. Relationship does not exist unless you've created it by accepting that tip. As for suggestion - they are only suggesting that you can create such relationship.

    > In some countries it is illegal to pay out to people without also filing tax documents to track the payment and provide the recipient with records they legally are required to keep.

PEBCATR - Problem exists between country and tax resident.

If those are really problems - you have problem with your gov and your laws, not bitcoin or tip4commit.

So, because you are philosophically opposed to certain laws, I should have my inbox filled with a tipping "service" and my name and projects listed as available to donate to, on a donation-collection site I refuse to do business with, and have no ability to opt out of it?

Protip: close the /r/bitcoin tab, close the mises.org tab, and learn to be a decent human being.

Your quotes are fucked on mobile.

> If those are really problems - you have problem with your gov and your laws, not bitcoin or tip4commit.

This is a staggeringly arrogant position to take. "Go change your laws, not this bitcoin service." Really?

"you have problem with your gov and your laws, not bitcoin or tip4commit."

"In some countries it is illegal to send unsolicited emails about services."

No, that sounds like a damn sensible law that I do not want to see changed, thanks.

you are taking life too seriously

So if I don't want to accept the taxation consequences, the shady project gets to use my name to raise money? There is no response I can have that doesn't have some cost to me.

In the US, if a payment is "available" to you, it must be reported as income at the time it becomes available. Failure to cash a paycheck doesn't mean you don't owe tax on it.

See IRS publication 525, page 2, "constructively received income": http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p525.pdf

There's some fuzziness and legal room here but the safe thing would be to declare it as income.

That makes absolutely no sense to me. If I get an offer from a bank that $200 is available to me if I open a checking account with them, then do I have to report it as income even if I don't open an account or perform any action to go after it?

The money is not available to you if you receive a contingent offer. Once you accept the offer then the money becomes available to you.

Same for tip4commit. You need to accept the their offer to give you money. Until you do, money is not available to you.

That depends. The difference here is that they are doing the bitcoin equivalent of leaving money on the table after you did unrelated work. Yea you have to reach down to the table and take it. But the IRS is saying until you do something about it, it counts as income because you effectively own it.

But again, lawyers haven't finished discussing all the legal ramifications of crypto-currencies or for that matter the internet in general.

The tip4commit payment is a tip paid because of work you did; elsewhere in IRS pub 525 and pub 531 it's clear (well, as clear as any IRS document ever is) that tips count as income.

the checking account offer isn't compensation for something you've already done. I think that makes it clearly distinguishable. But I'm not a lawyer; get competent legal advice before deciding you can pretend a tip-for-commit payment didn't happen.

> In the US, if a payment is "available" to you, it must be reported as income at the time it becomes available. Failure to cash a paycheck doesn't mean you don't owe tax on it.

I don't believe that's correct. A check which is never cashed is not income, as the funds are never transferred there is no income, there is no income tax. The point of the IRS regulation is that tax period in which the check is received is the applicable one, rather than the tax period when it is cashed.

Yes, it's true you're supposed to pay taxes for money earned in the year it was earned, not just when you happened to deposit the check. That has little to no bearing for this situation.

First, the money isn't available since it hasn't even been sent to you. Until you sign-up for the service, and provide a bitcoin address for the funds to be sent to your private key, they are not available. But more importantly, since you have no business relationship with the person giving the money, I would think the best characterization for the income is a tax-free gift (up to $14,000 per giver). But IANAL, and this isn't tax advice.

Either the service is just funneling money to software authors, or they are collecting it themselves and holding it unless and until authors want it. So if it's the latter, then they are raising money using someone else's name and reputation. Either way, that's not at all cool.

Set aside the legal/tax questions since it just brings out the armchair lawyers.

It is simply not cool to use a project's name to collect money from its fans without their permission. And without any promise that the money will make it to the intended recipient. And certainly without any indication of what happens to the money that doesn't make it to the recipient.

Simply put: it should be opt-in, not opt-out.

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.

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.

Assuming you had the muscle, what's the worst a dev could theoretically hit them with? Could they be succesfully sued? DMCA?

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. ;)

DMCA being relevant or not, my understanding is that the takedown notice goes to the website's ISP (LINODE-US in this case).

If a project name was trademarked, you might be able to get them for trading on that name, maybe?

Can you trademark open source project names?

I think so, yes. See Iceweasel[0], the custom Debian build of Firefox. I'm not sure that you'd be successful in using trademark law in this particular scenario though.

[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation_software_re...

Absolutely. Mozilla, Firefox, OpenOffice, Apache, Debian, etc are all registered trademarks and can not be used by others without permission.

And most famously Linux: http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4807:88w...

Yes, in fact GPLv3 specifically deals with trademarks in section 7e).

Hell yeah.

Drupal trademark policy http://drupal.com/trademark Apache trademark policy http://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/ Eclipse trademark policy https://www.eclipse.org/legal/logo_guidelines.php KDE® and the K Desktop Environment® logo are registered trademarks of KDE e.V. can't find the policy right now.

Maybe, but if they make it clear that they're not sponsored or endorsed by the project in question, it'd probably be considered nominative fair use, at least in the US: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_use

They are soliciting donations using the project name. I don't think that falls into nominative use. It'd be really weird if I could use the logo of the Salvation Army to solicit donations for my own organization even if I intended to give some of the donated money to them.

It depends on the country, in Canada you can certainly report them to the CRTC as breaking the law (CASL). http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/casl-lcap.htm

Emailing someone in Canada now requires consent (various legal ways) or close personal relationship. It doesn't cost anything to report them https://services.crtc.gc.ca/pub/rapidsccm/Default-Defaut.asp... . But if you really wanted to pursue them, you would have to hire a lawyer, a complaint doesn't have the same weight or speed of a legal filing.

This just goes to show you has clueless the developers are with regards to international policy and law.

Who holds the trademark for Django? That person or organisation might have standing in some jurisdictions to ask for it to be removed.

(IANAL, TINLA)

The Django Software Foundation is custodian of the registered IP of Django, including the trademark:

https://www.djangoproject.com/trademarks/

If you want to support Django and its community and development (which includes more than just commits to a git repository), there is also a mechanism to donate to the DSF:

https://www.djangoproject.com/foundation/donate/

Django's trademark is held by the Django Software Foundation.

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

This is the OSS crowd-funding/tipping equivalent of GetSatisfaction and UserVoice. Both started as service-desk/bug-tracking platforms that included the software of completely unaffiliated companies but have morphed into customer engagement platforms as SaaS.

Those projects are in the public domain. If there are purposes that you don't want your project to be used for then forbid it in the license. When you put your contact information in the public domain and then complain about being notified when somebody has given you money, I feel like you're complaining just for the sake of complaining. Set up filter rules or don't put your contact information on the internet.

If I was denied the chance to receive a donation for a contribution I made to an open source project essentially because the "project owner" doesn't agree then I'd be very annoyed.

> then forbid it in the license

Isn't this really all there is to say on this subject?

No, it's not. The software itself has nothing to do with taking donations on its behalf.

not a lawyer, but one quick way to gain some protection for these developers would be to treat their online archives at github as IP, use it in some minimal commerce activity and copyright the name of the product. At that point, it would be less legally defensible for tip4commit to solicit donations for them.

No. It's irrelevant and wrong. The third party site raising money in these projects' names is not using code from the projects to do so, it is only using the name. They are not bound by any license offered by the projects. Maybe the projects' authors can pursue some kind of action for that alone, but it has nothing to do with the terms under which the project is licensed.

Maybe licenses could be modified to cover the case of using the name? No idea what the legalities of this situation are, but if this problem is rampant, it seems at least plausible that the right legalese could help stem the tide.

No, they can't. Licenses are based on copyright law. The copyright holder may set terms under which the content they hold a copyright on may be copied and distributed. This is what a license is all about. Copyright does not apply to names of projects, titles of books, etc. Only to the content itself.

The use of the name, by itself, is not and cannot be protected by a license. This is the domain of trademarks, which few of these projects would have, because trademarks must be registered and paid for. But that's probably not the issue here. The real issue is that the site seems to imply a business relationship with various projects and contributors that does not actually exist. Likely, this is enough to bring action if it comes to that.

Also, to address a point of confusion in this discussion: The no-promotion provisions in the BSD license and similar only applies to derivative software, which would be use under the license. The author can place restrictions on promotion of derivative works only because the licensee is actually copying and distributing the code under license and the license is the only thing that would give him the right to do so.

> Those projects are in the public domain.

This is completely wrong.

> If there are purposes that you don't want your project to be used for then forbid it in the license.

This is completely inapplicable.

> If I was denied the chance to receive a donation for a contribution I made to an open source project essentially because the "project owner" doesn't agree then I'd be very annoyed.

Start your own project.

Thank you for taking the time to post this enlightening rebuttal.

They are all valid points, if you don't like it, argue against it, don't get snarky.

Edit: Yes thanks for that downvote, encouraging people to have an intelligent conversation through constructive arguments rather than making pointless remarks seems to be frowned upon by some people

The person who replied to him basically just said, "I disagree." They didn't provide any reasons for this. They were also being rude. I think his response was appropriate.

When you're factually wrong, there's not much to say other than "you're wrong and this is why." When you get saucy about being wrong...

But you didn't provide the "why" part. And he wasn't being saucy at first. He only did that after you didn't say why you disagreed.

I totally provided "why." The public domain has nothing to do with open source. Copyright doesn't apply to brand use. Dude didn't research but hopped right up on that soap box, and judging from the upvotes, I wasn't the only one to be put off by it.

You didn't say that in the reply that he responded to.

The first two are incontrovertible facts. If you don't want blunt responses, don't pretend a right to your own facts.

Shouldn't down votes be reserved for people who are being inflammatory or trolling? This guy just expressed his opinion. Just because you don't agree with him, does that mean you need to down-vote him? Doing this only encourages people to have the same viewpoint.

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