Gittip: Open Source Financing

There are a few interesting things at work here.<p>Gittip seems highly popular amongst Python contributors at the moment. The top four, other than the Gittip founder himself, are all primarily Python devs[1] and will make $2,400 per year (~$50 per week) from Gittip if it remains steady.<p>I wonder if Gittip is more popular within the Python community currently or if this is just a skew in the numbers. I do know that Armin has been encouraging people through Twitter to use Gittip if they feel his work is useful. I'd be interested to see if/when Gittip becomes more popular in other programming circles and what impact that has on payments.<p>The other thing is that &#62;$2,000 is actually a significant amount of money. It moves past "beer money" to "helps with rent" money and I expect this figure to continue to rise over time, especially for star OSS contributors. On top of that, it's also a form of social validation, especially when it is received when one gives their time freely with no expectation of a return.<p>Over time I think we'll find Gittip will encourage encourage and enrich the existing open source software model, not destabilise it as some people fear. Imagine if successful start-ups decided to give a few dollars to the creators of the software they use to make money. When your company is pulling in $10k per month, giving $50 per month (~$10 per week) to the creator of [core library] seems obvious and beneficial to both parties.<p>[1]: jnoller (Python/CPython), kennethreitz (Python Requests/Python for Humans), mitsuhiko (Flask/Jinja2), alex (Django,PyPy,CPython),

I back four people on Gittip, and I plan to increase that. Both in the amounts, and the number. I don't expect this money to go to anything specific. I don't even expect it to go to something related to the things you all do that give me reason to tip every week in the first place.<p>I do this because I want to. because I feel a need to give something to people who every day make my life a little easier (the OSS projects I use), or now and then do big and huge things (PyCon) that make my life better.<p>So, I want to do the same. I want your lives to be "a little bit better". Maybe that means you can take one gig less and spend more time on your free software projects. Maybe it means more time with the family, or friends, or alone. Maybe it means an extra video game in the budget this month. Whatever it is, that is your decision. It goes to something, I assume, that makes your life a little better, a little happier, a little easier.<p>I'm selfish, you see. The less stress you have, the more energy you have to put to the things that help me. It doesn't have to be direct. Go out and take up a new hobby with the money, spend it completely unrelated to the open source work you do. Because, when you come back home, you're going to feel a bit refreshed, with a clearer head, and you're going to do something great.

Having individuals tip is great but I think Gittip needs to support corporate sponsors. That's where it could turn from $50/week for someone to something quite a bit more substantial. I can see companies supporting projects on which their company depends.<p>Case in point is VMWare supporting Redis. It's an extreme (they hired @antirez) but I think a developer could make a living off a handful of companies all pitching in a couple thousand dollars a year.

I'm on gittip. Saw it here on HN, started tipping a few of my heroes immediately.<p>I didn't think of it as OSS financing, but rather as a way of making Armin's Friday beers-with-friends free for him. We'll see how it works out in the long run, but if that is all that it ever accomplishes – I'll still be backing it, because it's a <i>nice</i> thing to do.

Most of us use some amount of open source software. I think it is in our benefit to support those who make the effort to create and maintain the software we use every day.

I'm not sure who this is aimed at, open source software developers seem to fall into two major categories:<p>- employees at a company working on or using specific open-source software<p>- passionate individuals (sometimes small groups, usually after an original author gets a following)<p>The former are already paid, and the latter aren't in it for the money. The psychology of money is such that when you introduce money into the equation it becomes a "job", and people treat it as such. e.g. Would you help a friend move house for free? Yes. What if they paid you $3? No...?<p>Who is this product for, and how will it avoid this paradox of getting more out of people for "free" ?

I can't stress enough btw that I am more than happy with what I get out through gittip :-)

If you find this topic interesting, there was a presentation at GUADEC from Adam Dingle of Yorba (<a href="http://www.yorba.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.yorba.org/</a>) about "New funding models for open source software"<p><a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/511260/" rel="nofollow">https://lwn.net/Articles/511260/</a>

"Now if you look at the numbers it's not doing super amazing currently but I believe that's because not enough people back it at the moment and for a while that was mostly because getting money out of there was not yet easy enough."<p>The issue of getting money out seems to be solved: <a href="http://blog.gittip.com/post/30116848405/with-payouts-gittip-is-minimally-viable" rel="nofollow">http://blog.gittip.com/post/30116848405/with-payouts-gittip-...</a> (Posted previously: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4429225" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4429225</a>)

This website is important. Even in it's current stage, this is one of the long-term solutions to the main problems of FOSS.<p>Kudos to the owner for dogfooding it.

At what point is Gittip going to be issuing 1099s for all of the individuals it donates to?

What's with selling OSS? Let's say you provide the sources, but you sell the software using the app stores of the plattform. It's basicly the business model Red Hat uses.<p>I am askin' myself why software developers don't try this.

You don't need to insert money in order to be able to get money from the flattr system.