[Some context for others: when I first was responding to the idea of this bounty program, it was to someone else who had previously been considering working with Elizabeth; I was contacted in a kind of after-the-fact/"FYI" style. This was when the only real information was "bounty for iOS 7 jailbreak", without most of the extra restrictions that are now in place on the program, such as "open source". At the time, it for example seemed clear that evad3rs--the group that has been making the jailbreaks for the last two years--was going to get the bounty anyway. I already had started to bring up the incentive structure issues, and managed to get this other person to drop his involvement with the project. My original e-mail to Elizabeth thereby only talked about these issues, which is why this comment has to delve so deeply into the "final" point.]

So, your e-mail seems to make four points. The first point, taking up two paragraphs, is related to your career and your project. In these paragraphs, you did not address any of the specific example reasons I could come up with for why you were involved, and if anything simply raised a few more. These paragraphs, however, are largely ignorable.

The third point (setting off the second for a minute) was the argument made to attempt to address an incentive change on the side of the people building jailbreaks. This argument hinges on a specific example of a previous bounty, claiming that it did not cause the ramifications I am predicting.

> While I am sensitive to your concerns around community incentives, it’s unlikely that our approach will threaten them. For example, when Adafruit created a prize for open Kinect drivers, instead of devolving into a community of mercenaries, it enabled an ecosystem of Kinect hackers to flourish.[1]

[1]:
https://www.adafruit.com/blog/2010/11/04/the-open-kinect-pro...

The problem with this argument is that it is looking at entirely the wrong level: you are claiming that by having the driver for Kinect get constructed, people were able to start hacking on Kinect, causing an ecosystem on the other side of the driver to flourish. We already have that ecosystem on the other side of the jailbreak.

Instead, we are looking at the actual construction of the jailbreaks here; the correct analogy is to instead look at the market for construction of drivers for closed video game controllers. What you need to demonstrate is that a "success" for that crowd funding doesn't lead the people who were working on that driver to end up with different incentives, or cause other people watching to expect the same (again, in a "success" situation: I know people who work with Kinect, and I'd never heard the driver was crowd funded, so any community effects would be quite narrow due to the limited reach; likely as it was so little money).

FWIW, that people's incentives change in these situations is well documented: this isn't just my assertion, this is something you can read about in books like "Punished by Rewards". Given that a new jailbreak is needed at least once a year (and in a perfect world, would happen no less than twice a year), this is critical: you are playing an iterative game, and have to think about the ramifications on incentives not immediately, but a few steps ahead.

In reality, the community is already anticipating the release of an iOS 7 jailbreak (evad3rs has already publicly stated that they have all the pieces they need and are just working on implementing and finalizing). We (the community of people who use these jailbreaks: I do not build them myself) thereby are not in a position where this bounty is going to change anything: it is just going to change how funds are directed (5%, for example, will be given directly to your new company, rather than all of it to the people who build the tools) and the expectations people have related to them, it isn't going to incentive construction of a new community that otherwise wouldn't exist.

You then had a forth point, the goal of which was to assuage concerns that people leaving contributions would have different expectations. This argument was just "we state this clearly on the website"; <sarcasm>which, as we all know, works out wonderfully in the case of Kickstarter projects: it isn't like I've ever heard of people angry that they didn't get the thing they wanted, or that it didn't work well, as Kickstarter is very clear that they are not a way to preorder products</sarcasm>. You will need to come up with a much stronger argument here... if anything, I think you've just dug a deeper hole ;P.

[my comment is apparently too long for Hacker News; given that I often write very very long comments, I'm really surprised I've never run into this limitation before, and so wonder if it is new ;P. however, this comment is thereby split and I will reply with the rest]