By Zed A. Shaw

How To Get Sued, Git(Hub) Style

These days Jimmy Wales gets a lot of flack for his Urgent appeal donation campaign to raise some 16 million dollars. Holy shit, that's a lot of money, but hey I bet wikipedia could use the cash. They do real good work.

But, try to ask for money and what do you get from the peanut gallery? Parodies. Everyone's doing a parody, and frankly most of them are pretty lame. Yawn. Most of them though are smart enough to not try to use their parody to actually collect money under false pretenses.

Then comes the ever classy git and github guys. I see this plea from some guy at github who runs git or something like that. I wouldn't know since I'm not smart enough to use git and I actually like user experience rather than just pretending I do. He's just some dude to me.

Not really thinking about it I read this, and think, well damn, I mean I hate git with a passion but if they need money I'd give a little if it's....hey wait a fucking minute. Is this a joke?

I read a little more closely and they're asking for millions. Huh? To run git-scm.com. Nah, it's gotta be a joke and yeah ok dude is standing in front of an explosion in a desert. Probably a joke, but wait, why the hell is there a donate button then? I mean, git should have more money flowing into it than any other SCM in the history of time since that Faux-pen Source project SVN was astroturfed by Tigris.

Then it hits me, this jackass is actually collecting money from people and claiming--parody or not--that he needs millions. As someone who actually does need donations to make free stuff this just pisses me the fuck off. I mean, if I don't get the joke and have to confirm that it is actually a joke before writing this rant, then plenty of folks are going to get duped.

And you know what, tricking people into donating to a non-profit is called fraud and you get sued or go to jail for it. Don't matter how Hipster Hilarious your web page is.

Here's how this should really be done:

  1. Write a real parody and claim your needed amount is hundreds or trillions. Millions just lacks creativity and is misleading.
  2. Put the donate button behind a page that tells people, "Hey we were really just kidding about the plea, but it'd be nice if you donated anyway."

There, simple. Do that and you won't be cheating people out of their money.