

Ask HN: Critique this idea - ErrantX

(first up your welcome to share or create this idea if you really want to :))<p>Anyway, I had this idea when talking about a scheme to "reward" people for contributions to an FOSS project. Actually paying people is a bit against the grain (and most FOSS has no financial backing anyway) but it seemed like a good suggestion to have a method to personally reward someone in a serious way.
This was also prompted somewhat by a recent link to http://fairsoftware, who's model I quite like :)<p>So here's the idea. A combination of Twollars and Fairsoftware (and a bit of Tipjoy in there too).<p>You register your project and get X "shares". As people contribute to the project they can be awarded some of the shares (perhaps there could be SCM integration to give bit-y rewards to lines commited, or perhaps there could be a crowd sourced vote system to decide how much a contribution is "worth" plus, ofc, the ability just to gift shares as and when). These shares have NO money worth - until someone <i>donates</i> to the project.<p>At which point the owner can set aside a percentage (perhaps that he/she can limit to a certain total amount) for running costs (servers etc.). The rest gets spread out amongst the "share holders".<p>Instead of actually payiong out the money each holder can select a charity (from a list, or eventually maybe their own) to donate their share too. Their user page shows off how much they have "raised" for the charity.<p>The contributors get a meaningful reward for their work
The FOSS project gets linked to charity work (always good for the image :))
The donators know their money went to worthwhile places (whilst still showing appreciation to the project)
The project owner still gets running costs<p>Thoughts? Is this just an over complicated idea or does it have merit? Are there any FOSS contributors, donators or "owners" out there who might have interest in such a setup?<p>Go!
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jeroen
People who previously had no problem working on the project without direct
compensation will now feel undervalued if they don't get shares, but other
people do.

~~~
wlievens
So it could work for new projects?

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synnik
I think you'd need to define the value of contributions before you ever begin.
Otherwise, time will be spent bickering of the value of work, and not actually
doing the work.

~~~
pudo
True. Also, having quantified the value of each contribution might actually
create a disincentive for joining the project: that 5-line patch that was
going to be my very first contribution is now officially worth nothing, so why
submit it? By laying a focus on the top contributors instead of the
new/potential ones, this undermines the crucial ability of F/OSS projects to
motivate people to _gradually_ extend their involvement.

~~~
ErrantX
Yeh sold. :) The embryo for this grew out of wanting to try and make those 5
patch contributions worth something tangible and to encourage them... sadly it
seems the idea just got lost along the way and does the opposite.

Back to the drawing board :D

~~~
dflock
Maybe you could weight contributions differently, depending on what kind of
behavior you want to encourage? For example you could make first contributions
worth double, or have first contributions gain a bonus of x shares, which they
can cash in/withdraw after their 5th/nth contribution, or something?

~~~
sp332
That encourages new-account spam. Maybe you could make them wait, like a
"signing bonus", for a month? or until their third contribution?

~~~
dflock
Yes, that's what I suggested, actually.

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pudo
The implication that F/OSS donations should go to charity might not sit too
well with a lot of people. They're developing software in their own time and
giving it away for free - why do they now have to channel money to charity to
improve their 'image'? Having some donations every now and then might be a
nice thing, especially if you're the Mozilla foundation.

The same thing might even happen to the user base: the software is still free,
but now you get a guilt thing for not having donated to Oxfam.

Weird psychology at work here, I'd guess.

~~~
ErrantX
The charity inspiration comes from 3 main things. Firstly that it makes the
money distribution easier and would hopefully cut down a bit on arguments over
who gets what. Secondly a lot of FOSS projects _do_ support a charity with
donations - we might not be talking Oxfam here, what about software related
ones, like a Linux PC for every child? etc. Thirdly it means people know where
the donations go - rather than to all sorts of contributors it is going to a
recognisable charity :)

That said perhaps there are other avenues: the main point is to not give cash
out to contributors because that defeats the object somewhat (in my eyes :D).
For example it could go into some sort of software related fund (perhaps like
a google summer of code type fund) etc.

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dejan
Here is an idea for you, I won't go into criticizing your idea. If I knew what
will work out, or for that matter ANY of the people here, we would be doing
it. We can spend hours and hours talking about the idea, telling you the
problems why it wouldn't work, but still be way off course of the reality.
Recently I spoke with my ex boss who has been in IT for so long, now retired
and he said, quoted "If someone asked me back then if Facebook would have
worked out, I'd say no chance."

I think, we entrepreneurs shape the world around us to tune into new ideas.
Persistence and continuous mutation/evolution showed to work for life, why not
business too? Whenever someone asks a question here on HN, you get 90% of
critiques and ways of discouraging. I say screw them. The spirit of real
hackers and entrepreneurs is to just do it, be perseverant and have no fear of
failing, but if it is to happen, fail fast and learn from it for the next
iteration. No other can influence the success or failure than the entrepreneur
himself, so I think you should hear the tone of only those that give you
suggestions which way to go. I am sure you know what the problems are.

My suggestion. Build a prototype, use something that you can build it very
quickly e.g. Rails and then hear out what the people are saying about it. Then
modify it day by day from what you hear, and I guarantee you that you will
eventually end up with something great. Your idea might be brilliant or
stupid, but it is not on us to judge. Also, when you get discouraged, remember
it is not on you either to judge.

I personally believe that is indeed needed and a great thing and has been
going through my mind by reading a bunch of stuff. If I can somehow help, I'm
in. I recommend you read this, that you would help solve:

[http://www.strategy-
business.com/press/enewsarticle/enews053...](http://www.strategy-
business.com/press/enewsarticle/enews053107?pg=all)

Cheers!

Dejan/Aleveo.com

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alain94040
I'm one of the founders of FairSoftware and I have been thinking about the
problem you describe for 3 years now...

You are on the right track, but I would suggest some tweaks.

1\. Why does FOSS have to be given away for free? The freedom that RMS talks
about is in accessing the source code and improving it. In other words, if you
made donations to FOSS mandatory, you'd still have "libre" software, but not
"free" (beer) anymore. Is that too shocking a concept?

This could make the amount of money flowing in significant enough that
developers could start abandoning their day job and actually work full-time on
FOSS. Today, if you look at who significantly contributes to FOSS, apart from
a few exceptions, they are all somehow on the payroll of IBM, Sun, Intel or
Google. That's not freedom.

2\. In our implementation of FairSoftware, we used the paradigm of a
corporation, where everyone is a shareholder and decides on future share
allocation. To match better a FOSS implementation, I would recommend some sort
of karma, where everyone can upvote contributions they like. In large,
unstructured groups, it might work better. If I like what you do, I give you a
+1. Think of it like HackerNews voting, if you will. This is somewhat subject
to gaming, but nothing that can't be fixed.

It would provide a model for allocating the shares that is more in line, I
think, with the FOSS community.

Finally, I disagree with the statements that if you start compensating people
for contributions to FOSS in any way, you will pollute the well. If
implemented improperly, it's true that you can alienate the volunteers. That's
why I think the flexible karma approach would fit much better. You can receive
karma without having to ask. A good leader will make sure that newcomers are
welcome and give them some thank-you points as soon as they help.

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randomtask
What happens to shares when people stop contributing? Are they recycled? If
not then how do you deal with the possible eventuality that there will be no
more shares to award? Printing more on the other hand means this would be a
currency, not shares.

On a related note the Capitol Hill Baby-sitting Co-op paper is well worth
reading. This has been posted before, but in case you missed it:
<http://ideas.repec.org/p/kud/kuiedp/0335.html>

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davidw
Sounds complicated (transaction costs!) and people don't donate much to open
source projects in any case.

I'll add: how to fund open source projects is a Difficult Problem. A while
ago, there was a great mailing list called FSB (free software business), with
a lot of illustrious folks. They never really came to any definite conclusions
other than "it's difficult".

~~~
ErrantX
I was thinking about that.

Transaction costs (I assume you mean payout to the charity) weould be easy
because you just store up the charity donations from everywhere till it
reaches a reasonable value ($15 perhaps, or more) then payout costs are
minimised.

As to donations - I had a big discussion about that last night. In the end we
figured 3 things. Firstly collecting donations is a pain to handle so a lot of
people dont bother (especially as there is little worth to them). Secondly
there is no culture to donate even though many people probably _would_ if it
was easy and they could do it super cheap: a known central service to handle
donations wold be recognisable and trusted. Thirdly as a portion of the
beneficiary would go to charities and you could actually see that happening it
might encourage more people to donate.

In terms of complexity: I think it just sounds more complex than it is. Really
it IS just Twollars with a bit more on top.

Does that seem like a reasonable assessment?

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pmichaud
If you're at all familiar with how shares are traditionally divided in a
business, then you'll realize this is no trivial matter. If you want to think
of an individual operating agreement or charter as an "implementation," then
the complex negotiations, armies of lawyers, rounds of iterations, and
continuing amendments to these documents are a lot like a huge enterprise app.

What happens when we decide, like businesses, that we need new classes of
shares? Who gets paid first? Who has "voting rights"? What's the process to to
pursue remedies if you feel you've been cheated, or that the "board" (project
owner and his lackeys) has operated in bad faith to defraud share holders?

This is a complex issue even before you hit the psychological problems that
others have already raised.

What I'm saying is that shares can't really divided in a trivial, algorithmic
way. I like the idea in theory, but I think it's impossible to correctly
implement.

~~~
ErrantX
Actually I wasnt thinking anything like as complicated :)

The divison would be based on awarded "shares" - so we're not talking stock
exchange type shares (dont worry, I play the markets :) Im genned on realistic
shares) but "share of the donation"

After I posted the original message I realised it was misworded. The project
doesnt get X shares to divvy up. Rather share count is "infinite" and the
project owner hands them out (either by automated means or manually) to
others. So if 10 people contribute and each gets 1 share they recieve 1/10th
of the donation pot (after costs etc.).

If the owner wants a "share" they must give themselves some ;)

~~~
pmichaud
What you were thinking and what the system would eventually become are two
different things. I'm saying the inevitable consequence of a system like that
would be the scenario I described.

Do you think company stocks started out that complex? No, they started out as
an intuitive way to divide the profits of a business operated by multiple
people, just like your intuitive way of dividing profits from a project built
by multiple people.

Edge cases presented themselves, conflicts arose, opportunities for
individuals to maximize profit came to light, and thus was our current system
grown.

~~~
ErrantX
ok fair points; I assumed you were pointing out flawqs based on the model I
mis-represented.

Im not 100% sure I agree the problem would be as dramatic/bad as your
presenting though.

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growt
If the money isn't the motivator (gets donated anyway) you could use a virtual
currency. "karma" or something similar. You might monitor svn/git activity and
create a community where people could rate each others commits and give each
other some "karma" that way (hacker news with code submits instead of news,
sort of).

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hymanroth
This proposal is not too dissimilar to the ideas behind P-BOS
(<http://lmframework.com/page.php?id=pbos>)

P-BOS works best when the modules are small, and hence breaking down
individual contributions within a given module does not get too messy.

As to the 'morality' of charging for FOSS, the issue can easily be sidestepped
by giving developers complete control of the licensing and payment terms for
their modules.

For example, a given module (component) could be free for everyone, or just
non-commercial users. Developers should also be similarly free to route a
certain percentage (0-100) to charity. The key point is to leave all the key
decisions to individual developers.

If anybody wants to know more about P-BOS, feel free to drop me a line: david-
lmframework-com

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calambrac
I just wrote some code that the community recognizes as useful and that
thousands of businesses incorporate into their product or process. Thanks for
the twollar.

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izak30
Joel Spolsky talks about this over and over on the Stack Overflow podcast.
People who are willing to do something for free !== People who are willing to
do something for small bits of money or quantified reward.

It's possible that there is incentive to be had in the 'common goal'; "The Foo
Project's Charity is the FSF; If we squash all the bugs by Labor Day, 80% of
donations will go to the FSF. Otherwise, 50%"

~~~
ErrantX
I happen to disagree with Joel on that one - in particular circumstances :)
also the aim might be to encourage those who tend not to do "something for
nothing" to contribute :)

(The common goal thing is quite good....)

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nickcharlton
I think - like most ideas based around rewards the value will be seen in it's
worth.

As a silly example; 1000 Twitter followers would not have been valuable in
2006, but in 2009 it holds a value. It's the same with HN ratings.

An issue there is that new users will feel "at the bottom of the pile", and
possibly less likely to "rise up the ranks". At least once a project gets
going.

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mixmax
Once you put a dollar amount on work you have done, and then hand it over to
someone else you run into a can of worms regarding taxes. Uncle Sam will want
a share, and will eventually get it.

~~~
ErrantX
hence the donations model :) the contributor gets no cash-in-hand, so taxes
aren't a problem (just our taxes for donating to charities etc.)

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surki
may be you can use ohloh.net to see individual contributions on a project and
derive some calculations based on that. or may be you can even link the "donor
concept" into it. ?

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ghempton
Seems like donations could be put to better use than just being tunneled into
another organization under a different name.

