BitHub = Bitcoin + GitHub. An experiment in funding privacy OSS.

At Open Whisper Systems, we often get emails from people who’d like to donate money to the project. For an OSS project, particularly one that aspires to a collective sense of ownership, handling donations is not always entirely straightforward. The fundamental contradiction is that while donations are meant for a project , they’re traditionally sent to a person . Even if a project sets up a bank account, there are still only a few people who have access to the money itself, and distributing it appropriately can be hard to figure out. It’s never been clear to us how we should handle small donations, so oftentimes when people ask about donating, we just tell them that the best way to help is to use the software, spread the word, and file well-documented bugs when they find them. Which is true! But it’d also be great if we had a nice system for handling donations that matched our objectives for collective ownership. Read more...