<i>The dollars you spend purchasing Bad Code Offsets are donated to various worthy Open Source initiatives that are carrying the fight against bad code on a daily basis. These organizations currently include jQuery, PostgreSQL, and The Apache Software Foundation.</i><p>Very clever! In my grand naivete I assumed that my $.50 would go toward actually cleaning up bad code, but instead, it decreases the <i>relative</i> impact of my bad code by producing more bad code, which will help distract from mine.
<a href="http://codeoffsets.com/" rel="nofollow">http://codeoffsets.com/</a><p>Also, I think that the idea is not that stupid. Bad code have many (business also) consequences and I can imagine a savvy company that punishes teams for poorly written code with similar mechanism.<p>For instance, let's say that team has $100k bonus budget for a year. Every poorly written SLOC means $1, or $10, less in a budget because the company has to spend this money on QA or customer service.<p>Of course, what's really complicated is how to measure poorly written code (cyclomatic complexity, length of methods etc. basic metrics?), and how to adjust it to the deadlines.
This reminds me of <a href="http://www.cheatneutral.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.cheatneutral.com/</a><p>I'd say both of these parodies show why carbon offsetting doesn't really work.<p>---<p>When you cheat on your partner you add to the heartbreak, pain and jealousy in the atmosphere.<p>Cheatneutral offsets your cheating by funding someone else to be faithful and NOT cheat. This neutralises the pain and unhappy emotion and leaves you with a clear conscience.<p>Can I offset all my cheating? Well, first you should look at ways of reducing your cheating. Once you've done this you can use Cheatneutral to offset the remaining, unavoidable cheating.