Offset Bad Code, With Bad Code Offsets

An anonymous reader writes "Two weeks ago, The Daily WTF's Alex Papadimoulis announced Bad Code Offsets, a join venture between many big names in the software development community (including StackOverflow's Jeff Atwood and Jon Skeet and SourceGear's Eric Sink). The premise is that you can offset bad code by purchasing Bad Code Offsets (much in the same way a carbon-footprint is offset). The profits are donated to Free Software projects which work to eliminate bad code, such as the Apache Foundation and FreeBSD. The first cheques were sent out earlier today." Hopefully, they work better than carbon offsets, actually.

Comments

Deliberately bad?

[Geoffrey.landis]

Let me get this right-- you purchase this offset so that you can deliberately write bad code?

Why??

Re:Just call them by the real name, indulgences...

[jeremyp]

I'm sorry, but buying credits from a company that doesn't produce as much carbon emission as the government says it can is in no way actually helping the environment.

Wrong. It gives people a financial incentive to reduce their carbon emissions if possible.

If you merely tax or fine people, they will reduce their carbon emissions to the point where the cost of further reductions would outweigh the fines/taxes they'll have to pay. If they have the prospect of selling further reductions i.e. making money out of them, there is an incentive to make further investments to cut emissions below statutory levels.

If you and I both manufacture widgets, but I invest to reduce carbon emissions below whatever limit is placed and you don't, under a tax / fining system I'd be bonkers to go below the limit, or even to the limit. If it costs me $20 to avoid a fine of $10 it'd be stupid.

Under a carbon trading system, if I reduce my emissions below the limit, I can sell the credits to you so you can continue to emit the same levels of carbon. So the people who buy your high carbon widgets are subsidising the people who buy my low carbon widgets.

I'd go so far as to say a properly constructed carbon trading system is the only way forward.

By the way, there is a precedent. The US EPA introduced a trading system for sulphur dioxide emissions and apparently it worked like a charm.