I've long felt conflicted about accepting tips through Gittip, but John's nice argumentation here persuaded me to give it a try.<p>On the one hand, working on open source software (especially many years after the original projects have shipped, and you've moved on to other things) is really about the love -- a hobbyist's satisfaction of polishing a well-honed tool.<p>But on the other hand, when so many successful businesses are able to use that open-source tool to great effect, it can create a bit of a financial dissonance.<p>I'm not sure if I'll keep the account open for very long -- for one thing, if I end up back at the NYT towards the end of the year, I'll probably have to close it -- but until then, let's see how it goes. Maybe it'll feel good in a kind of dirty-capitalist-but-gift-economy kinda way.
I can't think of a better reply (from Gittip's point of view) to yesterday's "Money and Open Source": <a href="https://medium.com/open-source-life/d44a1953749c" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/open-source-life/d44a1953749c</a>. Thank you, jeresig and Khan Academy, for the huge vote of confidence, investing in open-source via Gittip! :D
The granting employees the $5 tip a week idea is pretty good. There are a lot of businesses out there that see the value of open source but don't currently fund development. There are certainly companies out there where the reason for not funding is more logistical than financial. Giving employees the ability to send money to where they see it can do the most good would be a great way to target worthy projects.<p>With sufficient freedom, I can see groups of employees organise themselves to coordinate development of features that are specifically important to their work.
An abridged list of organizations using Kenneth Reitz's python requests package:<p>Her Majesty’s Government,<p>Amazon,<p>Google,<p>Twilio,<p>Mozilla,<p>Heroku,<p>PayPal,<p>NPR,<p>Obama for America,<p>Transifex,<p>Native Instruments,<p>The Washington Post,<p>Twitter,<p>SoundCloud,<p>Kippt,<p>Readability,<p>and Federal US Institutions.<p>People generate millions of dollars of value through open source software. It's only fair that the people making that software are incentivized to keep doing so.
This is a nice gesture, but I do get the impression that the amount being donated to each developer is way too small for many developers to even bother signing up for gittip.
I would like to offer a contrarian view. Gittip is a nice initiative, in the "thank you for developing this project" kind of way - but I doubt anyone believes they can (or will be able to) pay the rent with donations paid through it. I wrote a post on this subject a couple of months ago, title "Open-source can't live on donations alone" [1].<p>I also don't subscribe to the notion that open-source should <i>only be about the love</i> - if companies like MySQL and Red Hat can make it into a huge business, and with the immense value open-source provides to the software industry, open-source developers should be treated as first-class citizens, not relegated to volunteer work late at nights, while doing their <i>real job</i> during the day.<p>Of course I'm biased, since I'm the founder of a company who's making that change happen. We started Binpress [2] to help developers build profitable businesses like MySQL and Red Hat around their open-source code. We do it by providing them with a platform for adding a commercial layer over their open-source code (whether it's self hosted or on GitHub, etc.), through commercial licensing and by providing customization, integration and support services.<p>We are a distribution marketplace, similar to the appstore or Steam but for open-source code products. We already have many developers making silicon-valley salaries working exclusively on their open-source projects - and we're just getting started. We've been bootstrapped (and profitable) for 2 years but are now closing our seed (after going through the 500startup program).<p>If any of this makes sense to you, you are welcome to reach out to me at eran@binpress.com (I'm Eran, the CTO and co-founder).<p>[1] <a href="http://www.binpress.com/blog/2013/04/14/open-source-cannot-live-on-donations-alone/" rel="nofollow">http://www.binpress.com/blog/2013/04/14/open-source-cannot-l...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.binpress.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.binpress.com</a>
Idea... Let's come up with some semi-standard language to include in contacts for client projects to request an optional fee to pass along to open-source projects used. Something like, "we recommend 1% of the development budget be allocated for contribution to open-source projects (blah, blah, blah)." It's easy to expense fees for software licenses, but there is no mechanism for open-source contributions. There should be.
I don't want to be critical of what is a small step in the right direction, but it does feel like such a very small donation. $5/week is, well, nothing. A developer at Khan probably earns $2000/week, and has an over cost to Khan of probably $2500/week at least.<p>I bring this up because I feel that if gittip optimizes towards that, then people will follow their lead. The right amount for a company with a wage bill of $3m/yr (back of the envelope based on figures in the article) to give back to OSS cannot be $6k/yr.<p>So one step in the right direction, and thanks Khan for doing that, and I'd love to see the next step being companies donating about 10x that each.
I had an excellent exchange with Chad recently on twitter (and then Github Issues) where we went through a transient GitHub OAuth issue that Github ended up acknowledging via email as being an error on their side. I feel much more confident in him and the gittip service where initially I felt some hesitation and doubt about the trustworthiness of the service.
I think there are a few things that are awesome about the Gittip model and a few things that are flawed:<p>Awesome things (1) fills a huge need (2) we should be in the habit of giving back (3) promotes long-term thinking<p>Bad things (1) dependent on CC processing (2) weekly only (3) A bit too much Github lockin.
Influence is worth more than git tips in the OSS marketplace. I can make more in an hour from an employer then I can in an entire year on gittip.<p>I'd rather have "star" or "follower" - those are things that can be meaningful in my career.<p>That said, I wonder if this model makes sense in countries where these dollar amounts have a more meaningful impact on your life.
Can someone explain to me why Gittip is called that?<p>I've never looked into it before because I assumed it was related to Git/Github and was thus some complex Git-related method of moving money around.