Transparent Funding of Git Based Projects

What Could Go Wrong?

Human

• Automated Funding will disrupt the behavior of the contributors.

This problem can't be solved with a technical Solution. Spreading money based on git commit behavior will affect the behavior of people and it will raise fraud and abuse of the system. This behavior can't possibly be predicted in all its detail. Therefore it is extremely important that individual projects can tweak all the time their spending behavior based on their experience with behavior shift and abuse.

The money spreading behavior should be simple and easy to understand for every initial project that starts using LibreSelery for their OS project, so that also fraud and abuse remains understandable by the project maintainers. They can then counter the Fraud with custom tweaks that they still understand but won't make the system more complicated for users in very different domains and fraud behavior.

The solution that we provide is an interface programmable by the user where he can use different metrics (implemented by us) to tweak the money distribution to their specific needs and experience.

<libreselery-funding-distribution-function.py>

Technical

• Why is funding probability split instead of spliting the funding directly into micropayments?

Each transaction has a transaction cost in coinbase. When transactions are not split, the losses towards coinbase are reduced to a minimum. The price for this is that there is the probability for unfair payment.

• E-mail spamming from Coinbase.
• Theft of Coinbase credit.
• Single point of failure: Coinbase

In the Longrun there should be more payment options that coinbase alone. We tested in the Paypal sandbox, but for production it enforces a commercial license, and we don't want to push our users into obtaining such a license.

• Abuse of collected user data. testing