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Comment by benbjohnson | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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. :)

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.

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