I don’t like the comment “this is why people say the open source ecosystem sucks” because a bankruptcy of a company has nothing to do with the concept of open source.
If you read through some of my other stuff, I mostly document controversy in the open source community. OSS developers being taken advantage of and loosing is just the norm, the only thing unique here is that the donation platform itself was doing that instead of the users
I didn’t and it doesn’t matter because you wrote it under this article and so it’s related to it. I’m not saying that it’s not true, but it can’t be related to this fact.
Bountysource was owned by a company called The Blockchain Group and it looks like the parent company went bankrupt taking Bountysource down with them. Its hard to say if Bountysource could have survived if it wasn’t sold to some cryptocurrency companies.
People were using this service to put up money to encourage programmers working on open-source software to fix specific bugs that were especially bothering them. For instance, if text in software X didn’t scale properly and that was a problem for you, you could use this service to offer $100 to programmers working on X to fix the text scaling. Once they got it fixed, they collected the money.
The service went bankrupt.
When it went bankrupt, some programmers didn’t get their promised payment for bugs they had fixed.
The money didn’t get returned to the people who had paid for the bug to be fixed, either.
So now both programmers and users have lost money because of this service, and everyone’s ticked off.
The best option is to just support the developer/project by the method they prefer the most (ko-fi/patreon/crypto/beer/t-shirts etc).
If the project doesn’t accept any donations but accepts code contributions instead (or you want to develop something that doesn’t exist), you can directly hire a freelancer to work on what you want, from sites like freelancer.com.
That’s incredibly scummy. If it were huge corporations, it would be a rounding error no one would care about, but this is OSS community members we’re talking about
Right? like the probably 50-100k they stole in total is whatever, but the fact they stole it from underpaid OSS developers and generous community members is disgusting.
I might apply for funding to research the real number that was stolen…
In 2017, the project was purchased by the cryptocurrency company CanYa, and in 2020 it was sold to “The Blockchain Group”. Coincidently, around this time, the Bountysource project announced drastic changes to its terms of service, enabling them to steal unclaimed bounties after two years
Here’s the thing: I’m excited about the tech and its potential uses. BUT there’s a reason why I still steer clear of any project that hasn’t built up reputation for years. If the project is worthwhile, early adopters will find out and eventually, it will grow over many years. Then it could be considered somewhat “trustworthy”.
The main Georgia.gov site runs on Drupal/GovHub(which they proudly talk about). Whereas team.georgia.gov runs on WordPress.org(probably an old version). This could be related to a lot of recently discovered issues with different pieces of software. It could also be someone high up was not doing a good job with their username and password. It could be due to a lot of different factors.
boehs.org
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