Hacker News Reader

Comment by kingkilr | Hacker News Reader

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?

View on HN

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.

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

Love the conferences idea.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com