Gittip: Open Source Financing | Hacker News Reader

Gittip: Open Source Financing

lucumr.pocoo.org

72 pointskracekumar46 comments

There are a few interesting things at work here.

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.

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.

The other thing is that >$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.

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.

[1]: jnoller (Python/CPython), kennethreitz (Python Requests/Python for Humans), mitsuhiko (Flask/Jinja2), alex (Django,PyPy,CPython),

I think Gittip is starting out amongst the Python community because it is built in Python. One of the signs Gittip is maturing will be its prominent use by another dev community.

I appreciate the work prominent OS contributors have made, and I hope that Gittip takes off.

I think it's network effects from it's founder as well. It is written in Python, Chad is active with python stuff. I think that the Python community is generous, but I doubt any more so than most other OSS communities. (Please prove me right!).

Speaking for direct personal experience: the Python community is amazingly generous. In some ways, more generous and giving and understandable than any other community I've been part of.

Of course, I'm grossly biased[1], and have been very lucky[2]

[1] http://jessenoller.com/2011/07/28/thank-you-the-impossibilit... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&...

Generally things tend to start strong in the community where the creator came from just because of connections. I remember github being much more Ruby focused than it is today when it started out :-)

As mentioned it's skewed towards Python because that's the community where I've been most active and have the most connections. I've started getting to know the Ruby community here in Pittsburgh and would love to branch out further. If you know of an event where people should hear about Gittip, please let me know. I've started a ticket for this:

https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/267

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.

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.

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.

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.

Love it. Thank you.

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.

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.

Can't a GitHub account be a corporation? AFAIK it can.

So where's the holdup?

The big issue here is that they still have the same limit on the max they can donate, $24 a week. Which, while fantastic! Isn't enough to move the need in the way the parent poster was discussing.

The way the site reads to me, the reason they have the limit is specifically to throttle the influence from a single contributor. If that is where they are coming from, I'd expect they would be reluctant to give more such power to companies than to individuals.

Here's the strong statement of the idea:

"enable companies to sponsor people"

https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/106

At some point the question becomes, why not just take a job at a company with a strong "open-source time" clause in your contract?

The challenge is preserving "no-strings-attached." One idea would be to allow gifts up to 5% of the total or something like that. Ticketed:

https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/266

One of the top givers is currently workforpie, which is a company, so it is already happening.

There is an issue for this already: https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/221

In general Chad is very receptive to suggestions and discussions and there is quite an amazing log of ideas surrounding Gittip in the github issues already.

:-)

We (Work for Pie the company, not me as an individual) started tipping folks recently. It's as easy as setting up a github profile for your company and signing up.

Our aim is to tip folks who have built and/or contributed to software that we use. Our way of saying thanks. :)

I'm on gittip. Saw it here on HN, started tipping a few of my heroes immediately.

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 nice thing to do.

I don't know how much Armin drinks, but he's already pulling down $50 a week which seems to be a pretty healthy Friday beer fund.

Honestly, the numbers for several of us (myself included) have well surpassed funding our beers with friends. Which is amazing, a little bit scary, and incredible. Unfortunately that leaves me in this awkward position where it's not enough to replace my day job, but it's a large enough sum of money that I want to do something with it, specifically something related to my open source work. If people are willing to try to fund my work, they should get their money's worth, even if it's not my full time job. For now what I'm considering doing is trying to use those funds to travel to various conferences I wouldn't ordinarily make it to.

But I'm interested in hearing what people "tipping" think. What do you guys want me (us) to do with this money until it's a full time salary?

I was very happy to see Armin's weekly go over $50. Those are some premium beers, and lots of friends to drink them with right there.

But more generally, I tip because you and people like you empower me. You don't tell me what to do with your software, I make it work for me however I can.

I can't see why this sentiment can't work the other way around. In fact, getting you to more conferences sounds great – much better than what I'd be able to come up with myself, and suggest.

Which is sort of the way it works with the software you people are making. :D

For me, personally, seeing gittip's come in is both a form of validation, and also at a certain point it can "free" me from the choice some of us who are full time employees, and then over-full time OSS/Community workers from having to decide between:

1> Do community/OSS work - the former being, well, highly political, painful, slow and yeah.

2> Drop the community work and just pick up paid contracts on the side to help my family.

I'll always be part of OSS, no matter what - but there's a point at which the time/benefit ratio (depending on what you're working on) becomes on of "how much time can I rationalize working on this when I have other things to deal with".

In my case, albeit a fairly unique set of circumstances, it's a choice between time with my girls, medical bills, etc, etc and the choice to dedicate a lot of time working on things a lot less sexy than code.

Sure, as others point out, I get paid a salary, I have a full time job. But as I also point out in https://www.gittip.com/jnoller/ - I've got a lot of other "full time jobs" not including family time.

Just some thoughts - for you, using the funds to go to conferences, teach and do things your current funds would not cover or allow you to (say, taking unpaid leave to do a workshop someplace) would be a fantastic use of it.

Love the conferences idea.

And the fact that you came up with it totally validates the "pretty smart grants" concept. :-)

> 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.

And I am very grateful for that. I would never have expected the amount of support through gittip in the first place seeing where it started out. I am very happy with my job and I don't want to do my Open Source stuff as a living (at least for a while).

That however does not mean the concept could not evolve from where it is currently to something bigger.

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:

- employees at a company working on or using specific open-source software

- passionate individuals (sometimes small groups, usually after an original author gets a following)

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...?

Who is this product for, and how will it avoid this paradox of getting more out of people for "free" ?

Those are great questions. And I don't think they have easy answers. For me, the motivation is to eventually get to a put where this can replace my day job. Until it can get there, unfortunately, it's an awkward balance to not let the money affect your contributions, and still do something useful with it; see my other comment for more thoughts on that.

Like Alex, I replied elsewhere (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4439026) - I fall into both of your categories. However in the latter case (passionate individuals) there's a lot of work out there that doesn't fall into "cool new sexy code with lots of followers) and rather falls into the "sweeping the floors, working out outreach and fighting stop energy in various things) that are a lot less emotionally and tangibly rewarding (in fact, they're more draining than coding) than shipping awesome code.

> and the latter aren't in it for the money.

It's for the latter. We certainly need money to survive, and the more money we have such that we don't have to show up to work on someone else's for-profit idea, the more time we have to give to our projects.

PyPy core dev speaking here. I do it mostly for passion. Every now and then I have to do something for someone that falls into few categories like "stupid website that would never take off" or "some pypy usage that makes absolutely no sense to the broader community". Those things mostly slow down pypy development and frankly the benefits are very very low. I would be more than happy to get rid of this stuff as it's distracting. Can gittip be the way to do it? Maybe. Would it be beneficial if we find some way to do it? I think so.

I think you're oversimplifying the kind of developers out there. Have you honestly never seen an open-source project with a Paypal Donate button, or some form of the old "Buy me a beer" solicitation in a README?

The latter are necessarily in it for the money, if only to continue existing. As an example, Clojure: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!msg/clojure/zH...

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 (http://www.yorba.org/) about "New funding models for open source software"

https://lwn.net/Articles/511260/

Cool! Thanks for the link. :-)

"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."

The issue of getting money out seems to be solved: http://blog.gittip.com/post/30116848405/with-payouts-gittip-... (Posted previously: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4429225)

Automatic payouts landed last week (which was week 12 of Gittip). Reminds me to check whether the deposit cleared ...

It did! Woo-hoo! Thank you people! :D

Here's the page to connect a bank account if you have money to withdraw from Gittip:

https://www.gittip.com/bank-account.html

If you're not in the US then you should add a +1 here:

https://github.com/balanced/balanced-api/issues/23

This website is important. Even in it's current stage, this is one of the long-term solutions to the main problems of FOSS.

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?

IANAL. The IRS allows gifts (bona fide no-strings-attached gifts) from individuals to individuals up to $13,000 per year with no tax required†. After $13,000 it is the responsibility of the giver to pay taxes on the gift, not the recipient. To be clear, the person receiving gifts can receive up to $13,000‡ per giver tax-free. There is no limit on how much a recipient may receive as a gift without paying tax. gittip does not even approach these limits, and if it did then the giver would file Form 709, and there would be no 1099.

† http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=108139,00....

‡ married couples may collectively give up to $26,000 per recipient per year

Here's the ticket tracking the tax implications of Gittip:

https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/96

TL;DR: It's too early to tell. We've started contacting tax professionals and don't have good answers at this point.

If people start making upwards of 5k from gittip, the IRS is going to classify that as income.

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.

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.

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