

Ask HN: Idea - Github for sharing revenue amongst contributors - lefnire

What do ya'll think: A service which takes all revenue made by an open source project on Github and distributes it by percentage contribution amongst its committers?<p>So first you have an open source project which has revenue or revenue-potential. Maybe it's funded by investors (Meteor) or Kickstarter (Light Table), a purchasable product (Textmate), a Freemium service with a private branch hosting its premium IP, etc. Then you have the service I'm proposing: a web app which collects the revenue somehow - this needs to be thought out, but maybe interfaces with Kickstarter as an example, and the funds are escrowed to this service per project instead of the project owner. The service monitors the Github project's "Contributors" graph (eg, http://goo.gl/3Byjj) and uses Gittip to distribute funds based on percentage contribution. This includes commits by coders, designers, legal specialists (LICENSE), writers (README, gh-pages, documentation), etc.<p>It strikes me as something that could create dynamic, auto-pilot micro-companies; catalyze bootstrapped products; and better incentivize contribution to open source. It also enables coders to invest with their commits. "Meteor? Oh, I'd totally use that - I'll start committing to make sure it happens."<p>Anyway, what you guys think?
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gersh
I think it is interesting idea. However, I think you need a better system than
just the number of commits, or lines of code committed. I don't these are very
accurate measurements for the degree which someone contributed to the project.
You need a more sophisticated system to determine that.

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japhyr
This strikes me as quite similar to the difficulty in paying teachers by their
performance. You can use a lot of objective data for your decision-making, but
there probably needs to be some subjectivity in there as well.

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_delirium
In other parts of software as well: the use of lines of code, and various
modified LOC metrics, to quantify programmer productivity is fairly notorious.

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lefnire
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_open_source_applicat...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_open_source_applications)

