An idea for Github to make more money
umairashraf.me
umairashraf.me
However since the release of the tool in may I had around 20000 downloads but less the 20 persons supported the development by donating something. I still hope that having such a facility directly embedded in Github would allow people to be a bit more philanthropic and rewarding for the developers as often developers would probably want to continue full time the adventure of developing a product or a library.
Imagine Github does implement this. Now you have a bunch of coders who want to work on "open source" projects for money, hoping to get backers as if they did a Kickstarter project. Or maybe it could start an OSS Github "gold rush."
Now that we have a bunch of money-hungry developers, it'd be pretty easy to de-rail or commandeer projects simply by donating a large portion of money. Now imagine a non OSS competitor starts contributing. Multiple things can happen:
1) Any innovation or development of features could be easily copied and incorporated into competitive projects for sale.
2) A developer gets "hooked" on that donation money and starts favoring the large donors' requests over others.
3) These requests could sabotage the quality or the focus of the project.
4) The donor could pull funding at this point and collapse development and support of the project.
Full blown conspiracies aside, the whole point of OSS was to open up development for everyone to grow and learn, and to remove software development from the corruptible influence of money.
I think others on this thread had a great idea, make it a "tip", and make it anonymous. We would still have to limit "tips" because anyone can make a huge tip and then e-mail a "ransom" letter to the developers to do stuff if they want to continue getting large tips. The previous ordered list applies here.
Again, I'm going to an extreme and likely this sort of abuse wouldn't be rampant in a system like that. But involving money at all directly into the process sounds like it could do more harm than good.
If you want to take donations, you can do a Kickstarter to get up and running and then take some sort of "beer" or micropayment service on your website. Github integrating this into their offering seems irresponsible to the OSS community at large.
What? I've been part of the F/OSS world in one capacity or another for something like 15 years now, and I've never heard anybody posit that before. Yes, some F/OSS advocates are somewhat anti-commercial, but to say that "the point" of OSS is about removing the influence of money, is a pretty novel idea from what I can see.
Consider this: The FSF specifically say, in the GPL FAQ[1], that you can charge money for GPL'd programs. The Open Source Definition (OSD)[2] has as it's first plank:
"The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale."
And programmers employed by various corporations contribute a significant amount of code to the ASF, and to the Linux kernel, etc. Look at the Apache OOo proposal[3], for example, and now how many of the initial committers were from IBM or Red Office.
[1]: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html
What I don't want to see is programmers begging for "donations" so they can work on their project. Clearly my example was a little overblown, but if its not broken why fix it?
Thanks for the info though - as I'm sure I'm not the only one that learned from it.
That's sort of begging the question: "Will money disrupt OSS development? Well, yes of course, because the point of OSS is to prevent the corruptible influence of money."
Lots of people working on OSS projects do so while on somebody's payroll, and they don't seem to derail those projects as a matter of course.
1) Developers build OSS components that solve a larger business need for the organization. The fact they could modularize it and make it generic enough for open consumption is intrinsic motivation on part of the developer. In this case the "somebody" who is paying them doesn't really care about the OSS, just that they solve the larger task.
2) People build OSS projects on their own time, while working for someone else.
3) Someone is contracted or paid to build a solution for someone. Turns out it would be great OSS, and is given away for free afterwards. The contracting party is essentially paying for the development.
4) Then theres the case you point out. Where people pay others to explicitly build OSS, which I could be wrong but I don't see that happening that often, outside of maybe Redhat or something.
If you contribute code to an OS project, and then someone makes money from that OS project, do you feel pissed off that you didn't get a cut of that money?
If you trust people to build you free stuff, why do you suddenly not trust them to get paid for it?
edit: clarified
https://www.gittip.com/about/stats.html
Right now I'm personally grossing $65 a week on Gittip, for example.
https://www.gittip.com/whit537/
It's all developed as openly and transparently as possible. It's not a traditional for-profit model like GitHub.
'If you contribute code to an OS project, and then someone makes money from that OS project, do you feel pissed off that you didn't get a cut of that money?' - like a lot of money? and something you put a lot of code into? then yea. have you had an open source project that others have taken and reaped hundreds of thousands of dollars off of? I have, it sucks.
'If you trust people to build you free stuff, why do you suddenly not trust them to get paid for it?' - because ideal human behavior is different from real human behavior.
Like another user already said, more money doesn't necessarily mean a boost in development speed/quality. I think there is something in "Kickstarter for developers" (there are bounty based sites that work like this), but I don't believe it really fits with the product/value prop.
I still think Github's biggest potential for revenue is from the enterprise-sized to medium-sized development shops, by way of creating software collaboration tools. Git can be hosted anywhere, but there are reasons why developers like Github beyond it being a repository.
[1] https://github.com/blog/57-getting-paid-the-open-source-way/
There might be issues if the project has contributions from a large number of unconnected developers (on how to split the amount), or alternatively a project getting a decent amount of funding may put off certain developers, who then might not want to contribute for "free".
On the other hand, it could become a marketplace for contractors. That would be cool. Each project could make a small proposal and invite bids from freelancers, who could all bid on github.
Yeah, lots of interesting possibilities.
It would be nice if Github gave you the option of adding $1 - N$ onto your membership fee, and then distributed that between the open source projects or authors that you follow.
chosing whether to give to the main dev, a specific dev or equally spread that donation amongst all devs contributing to a project would make it a lot more fair too. i would use this functionality with a doubt.
First, I think GitHub could definitely make some money doing what OP suggests.
Second, Gittip is starting with GitHub but I hope it will grow beyond GitHub.
Third, sums are growing. Gittip is a month old. We moved $30 three weeks ago and moved $380 last week. We're set to move $480 tomorrow--more if you contribute! :-)
Fourth, the pricing model is different. If GitHub were to do like Kickstarter they'd take a 10% cut. Gittip is priced to cost.
Fifth, Gittip drinks its own Kool-Aid. The people developing Gittip (i.e., me) are looking to make their living through Gittip itself, not from a 10% cut.
Sixth, Gittip is developed in the open ... on GitHub. Jump in! :D
While I generally love the idea and think well of it, your fifth point is actually a bit of concern. I'd rather you took a small percentage and were able to maintain things.
What if you're moving hundreds of thousands of dollars a week, but are still only getting $200 and change for yourself? Will the site close? As an 'opted-in' developer, there goes my revenue stream.
I'm not saying it isn't noble, but while I can appreciate you relying on it for your revenue stream, and would love to get to a point where I could rely on it for mine, there's a confidence factor in the service that doesn't necessarily interact with either of those.
It might not mean anything to anybody else, but I'd have a hard time relying on that until I knew it wasn't going to implode, and that probably means periodically checking your number.
Another small concern I have with it are actually seeing the totals. If you get to $600 on your page, that's $2400(ish) a month. I worry that figure might discourage people -- "Oh, he's already 'rolling in it', I'll tip somebody else that needs it more." I feel like it almost looks like charity at that point.
It'll be interesting to see how things actually shake out though.
For further reading, there exists plenty of discussion and analysis surrounding bug bounties for security vulnerabilities. Bounty rewards are typically a token gesture that don't even begin to cover the real costs of the developer/researcher. And for open source projects -- many developers are writing code for fun, as a challenge or as an experiment. Are intrinsically motivated developers going to respond positively to extrinsic motivators?
http://blog.flattr.net/2012/02/winter-update-github-tweets-e...