I think that implementing "opt-in" is the natural solution and yet the maintainer writes that it will "brake everything". I don't understand this extreme reluctance of Tip4Commit to acknowledge the right of owners of projects to control things tightly related to the projects they own.

For what it's worth, I don't believe maintainers have a moral or legal right to control what happens between third parties - that is, contributors to their project and those who wish to support them.

I wouldn't be opposed to implementing opt-out at a project level... but it's not my project.

As I told you on reddit, I'm going through hell trying to opt-out as an individual. I know for a fact that they harvested and have been using information about me from GitHub without my permission and in violation of GitHub's terms of service. Since your comments consistently resort to legalism, how do you resolve that conundrum? I'm honestly trying very hard to not just go with the nuclear option of starting to seek enforcement of service-provider terms to shut down tip4commit, but they aren't exactly leaving tons of other options.

If they're violating Github's T&C, that seems like a good place to start. You've obviously given them plenty of notice of your discontent - they've had ample opportunity to work with you to resolve it.

I guess they still have a moral right to ask their contributors to be up front about the incentives involved in their contributions (they can't demand disclosure, but they could still refuse contributions where they don't feel they have enough understanding of the incentives involved).

The point being, setting the thing up behind their back brings a lot of risk of poisoning the relationship between the contributor and the project.

Maybe it's stupid for a project to act like that, but once it turns into a hair splitting exercise, you might as well split all of them.

Devil's advocate: If you wish to tightly control everything related to your project then perhaps use a private CVS rather than a public repo on Github. By using Github's free and very social oriented service you are implicitly giving up some control over the project.

Opt-in would kill the project. But I think they could do opt-out if they were a LOT more sensitive to their constituents.

If opt-in would kill your project, it's probably a bad project. Much in the same way that if your business can't survive without exploiting people, it's a bad business.

Opt-in doesn't mean they couldn't inform projects when someone actually wants to donate. First donation just needs to be framed as an invitation to use tip4commit with no being a valid (and default) option.

Why would being opt-in kill the project?

Because instead of having a million projects, you'd have 3. The power of defaults and opt-out is pretty well-understood to the point I'd call it non-controversial.

So what? That is a typical use case for an opt-in platform with possible good outcomes. If you do it opt-out, it's unsolicited, unwelcomed and just badly setup. This discussion and the one on Github itself is a perfect example why.

You can't blame someone else for not having a responsible (e.g. opt-in) growth engine...

They would have projects from people who are interested in their services, and interested in having them accept money on the projects behalf. If that number is 3, so be it.

Which is why you have to be way more aggressive in just about any endeavor.