[pjbrow]

It would be great if a developer beyond the reach of the Western legal system would take this project up with a self hosted repo. Code is speech. It's a terrible precedent for devs to be afraid to have code (including me after reading this). This is where the myriad of outdated laws and prosecutorial discretion bites: it's impossible to know where the legal line is.

__ Addition: My view on the savvy modus operandi here (I'm a lawyer when I'm not a developer). If you give someone any kind of reason to sue you, you're essentially handing them a stick. It's much worse if they can afford to hit you with it and you can't afford to defend yourself. The people threatening to sue these guys are almost certainly making silence a condition not to sue. This isolates the devs from people who could support them, and has the added effect of intimidating other devs with the unexplained "disappearances".

[espadrine]

There is no western legal system. As absurd as it sounds, what went down with TPB shows how laws perspire beyond a country's boundaries.

As for what actually happened to PT, it isn't as clear-cut as it seems.

I can tell you one thing as food for thought, though. I contributed a minor patch to two forks. I was granted a small amount of dogecoins (about $.10) for one of those contributions. The notion that there would be a remuneration model behind that rather unique type of open-source project tells a lot about how lacking we are. We miss economic models for the free capabilities we build. Things like Gittip only just emerge, but the way they solve the problem of having multiple people be granted a fair share of buying power based on their contributions don't actually rely on a robust mathematical model, and are very probably flawed at scale. That is true of Gittip, it is true of Flattr (notably irrelevant when dealing with a team), it is even true of the Bitcoin ecosystem, given the absence of a proof for the convergence of its volatility.

Those challenges raised by the amazing prospect of a truly decentralized economy are greater than building an app on top of a peer-to-peer network of video distribution. They wouldn't be the first to direct their efforts there, either; a famous TPB member created Flattr after putting his TPB past behind.

PS: on the issue of the struggle for equitable remuneration, here is an outstanding blog post by someone working in a cooperative called Igalia; he did contractor work on V8 and Firefox for Bloomberg: http://wingolog.org/archives/2013/06/25/time-for-money

[Joeboy]

I was thinking about approximately this just yesterday. I have a banal coding problem that's in the way of what I actually want to do, and would be prepared to pay somebody maybe a hundred bucks to make it go away. Probably there exists a person with the skills and experience to make that happen easily, and for whom that would constitute a non-insulting payment, but I don't know how to find them. There are open source bounty sites, but I doubt I'm going to find the specialist I need on any of them. So instead I'm going to have to spend hours or maybe days learning stuff I would rather not know about.

Edit: If anybody can make this python call to lilv's swig bindings not segfault, I will give them a hundred bucks:

https://github.com/Joeboy/joeboy-lv2-plugins/blob/master/lv2...

[Spittie]

I'm honestly surprised that nobody (that I know off) has started to develop a fork while being behind Tor/I2P.

[cottonseed]

I agree. But where are they going to host it? Maybe you don't get hit with a lawsuit, but your github repo still gets taken down. Set up a hidden service git repo? Does that scale? How do you accept changes? I'm sure people are making and sharing changes privately. Maybe there is a need for better censorship-resistant code collaboration tools? Some kind of peer-to-peer github that works over Tor.