Gittip at Khan Academy | Hacker News Reader

Gittip at Khan Academy

ejohn.org

I've long felt conflicted about accepting tips through Gittip, but John's nice argumentation here persuaded me to give it a try.

On the one hand, working on open source software (especially many years after the original projects have shipped, and you've moved on to other things) is really about the love -- a hobbyist's satisfaction of polishing a well-honed tool.

But on the other hand, when so many successful businesses are able to use that open-source tool to great effect, it can create a bit of a financial dissonance.

I'm not sure if I'll keep the account open for very long -- for one thing, if I end up back at the NYT towards the end of the year, I'll probably have to close it -- but until then, let's see how it goes. Maybe it'll feel good in a kind of dirty-capitalist-but-gift-economy kinda way.

Does NYT have a policy about taking on outside work or accepting money from outside sources? If NYT means New York Times, is this something to do with journalistic integrity? I liked the author's suggestion about donating unwanted tips to charity or turning them back around into tips.

Yes. When you're working in the newsroom, you generally need to steer clear of accepting any gifts, free services, or free products. It really matters when it's from a company that the Times has covered, or might write about in the future -- but that's a pretty wide net, and most startup employees would arguably fall into that category. The Khan Academy's sponsored donation program certainly would.

Here's the actual language:

    Staff members may not accept gifts, tickets, discounts, 
    reimbursements or other inducements from any individuals 
    or organizations covered by The Times or likely to be 
    covered by The Times. (Exceptions may be made for trinkets 
    of nominal value, say, $25 or less, such as a mug or a cap 
    with a company logo.) Gifts should be returned with a polite 
    explanation.

From this little gem of a handbook: http://nytco.com/pdf/NYT_Ethical_Journalism_0904.pdf

... it's the Times' internal ethics rulebook specifically aiming at the conundrums of journalism -- but I think that quite a lot of it applies to ethical business practices in general.

I had a go-round on this with Gabe Stein of FastCo.Labs. Since Gittip is anonymous in the particulars I thought maybe that would get around the journalistic conflict of interest, but Gabe articulated how that probably wasn't sufficient because there's always the threat of finding out (as with jashkenas and Khan in this case).

Queued up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OerW0Q_2_7o#t=32m03s

Not sure yet what, if anything, is to be done about this. Gabe is experimenting with Gittip as well:

https://www.gittip.com/gabestein/

What if there was a mode that folks could set their accounts to, where they couldn't cash out and could only pass it on to other users? People could go into that mode when they were in a job that frowned upon gifts, and it could be displayed prominently so that allow donors were aware :)

Perhaps the system could even convert dollars to some sort of non-monetary "token", which they could pass along to someone who could cash it out, and then there's further reason that it wouldn't be considered a gift?

If you don't connect a bank account then this is effectively what happens. Also, it's currently public on your profile whether you've attached a bank account.

But presumably you could let cash accumulate, and add a bank account later. I think probably passing the money through to a charity is the safest.

I'm afraid that wouldn't help in this case. The conflict of interest here is the possibility of any appearance of favoritism -- whether you happen to be on the giving or the receiving end of the equation doesn't make much difference.

There are sections in that guidebook about donations to political parties. Gittip forwarding would be a similar, albeit grayer, area -- donating to (say) prominent folks from Microsoft Research would be iffy. More so if you then proceeded to work on any Microsoft-related stories in the future.

That would still allow bribes. Let's say I'm a jouralist and a good friend of mine is on gittub. Someone can give me money, and I give it all to my friend. I now think very highly of the person who gave that money.

Maybe a gittip feature (I don't know if it already does this) is an option to make all donations anonymous so that the recipient does not know the source. This should remove the conflict of interest then.

As whit537 mentions in a sibling comment, all Gittip donations are already anonymous, but blog posts like John's here end up removing the anonymity for particular donations.

That doesn't stop bribes. I could "gittip" you a lot of money. It comes up as anonymous, but I tell you that it was me.

I'm really happy that you've signed up!

Amusingly I'm in a very similar boat to you. I'm fairly certain that almost all the money that I'm receiving on Gittip is due to my work on jQuery - which I haven't actively worked in quite a few years.

One way in which Chad explained it to me, that resonated, was that Gittip can be better thought of as a "genius grant". People are giving you money not to support a specific thing (otherwise Gittip would be project-centric, not person-centric) but to support YOU and the things you want to do.

It's kind of crazy because I'm fairly certain that I'm getting donations because of my work on jQuery and not for my current side-project research into Japanese woodblock printing - but people don't seem to mind! (And I've made it clear on my profile what it is, exactly, that I'm working on right now and what I'm using the money for.)

I have a full-time job at Khan Academy and I'm well paid so I don't need the extra money - but it is appreciated. I'm re-donating a portion of the money that I get. Additionally it's paying for my extra server costs for my side projects and it's probably even paying for a good chunk of my monthly utility bill. I've been trying to think of other ways in which I can use the money that'll have a more obvious "money in -> using money -> output" pipeline but I'm not sure what that is, yet.

Let's hope you'll be able to keep your account open and find good uses for the money!

Hah. I'm afraid that -- between being currently funemployed, having just had all of my worldly possessions (at least for this year) stolen out of the back of my car last week, and discovering that travel insurance doesn't really cover it very well ... I can certainly think of a few good uses for it ;)

I'm afraid that I'm still "actively" working on everything (except for Ruby-Processing, which has been passed along), but it's all on a light simmer on the slow burner. More excitingly, there's a new OSS project, still in the early planning stages, which I'm pretty jazzed about.

Seriously though, thanks for the nudge. Much of the time, open source can feel like a slog through a bottomless pit for inane GitHub issues, with the occasional diamond in the rough. Your article is making open source feel more like a friendly love-in tonight.

Geez, man. Wow. I'm sorry. :-(

I can't believe I'm asking this, but what would it take for you to work on open-source full time instead of going back to NYT in the winter? Is that something you would even want?

What would it take to keep you funemployed forever?

    > Is that something you would even want?

I don't think so. Having a balance between short-term deadline driven stories and slower, larger, more greenfield projects is a terribly nice luxury for a programmer to have. I also find it hard to imagine a more interesting and enlivening day-to-day environment than a national newsroom.

I talk a little bit more about it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3HanxEFFlk

... and Derek's got a great post from this morning about the job as well: http://thescoop.org/archives/2013/07/16/why-develop-in-the-n...

Fair enough. Thanks for the links, and for giving Gittip a try. :-)

Can we get a hint about the new project that is in early planning stages?

Hint: "Will It Blend?"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USiaeXzYkOE

So definitely a high performance open source kitchen appliance.

Or something to do with open source movies/3d (Blender).

Or maybe its something like literate CoffeeScript but allowing you to use any language that compiles to JavaScript.

Or maybe its a way to edit programs interactively by using a non-textual abstract syntax storage format that allows for different types of presentations or editors. Like reactive CSS for ASTs or something.

LOL.

If you enjoy speaking or attending conferences, I've tried to use some of the money (since I'm also in the "have a full time job" boat) towards going to conferences I normally wouldn't, and trying to be an asset to the community there.

Just an idea, but if you get a bunch of tips coming in, that'd be awesome if you tip them to projects that you use. You probably have a pretty good idea of what the cool things on the horizon might be.

That, and perhaps even better -- I have some tireless contributors to projects like Backbone who really deserve the thanks. For (one, good) example, @braddunbar is a shining paragon of helpful and polite open source contributions.

https://www.gittip.com/on/twitter/braddunbar/

I can't think of a better reply (from Gittip's point of view) to yesterday's "Money and Open Source": https://medium.com/open-source-life/d44a1953749c. Thank you, jeresig and Khan Academy, for the huge vote of confidence, investing in open-source via Gittip! :D

The granting employees the $5 tip a week idea is pretty good. There are a lot of businesses out there that see the value of open source but don't currently fund development. There are certainly companies out there where the reason for not funding is more logistical than financial. Giving employees the ability to send money to where they see it can do the most good would be a great way to target worthy projects.

With sufficient freedom, I can see groups of employees organise themselves to coordinate development of features that are specifically important to their work.

This seems like something Gittip.com could offer as a feature: employees can log in and pick who to contribute to, and the company account they're associated with automatically makes the payment.

Reduce that logistical hurdle to a signup. :)

Andy Weissman from USV suggested that on a skype call we had. Unfortunately that was before I started doing open calls so I can't link to it. :-/

Ticketed: https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1153

> doing open calls

I like gittip and your philosophy. I think you've convinced me to sign up.

An abridged list of organizations using Kenneth Reitz's python requests package:

Her Majesty’s Government,

Amazon,

Google,

Twilio,

Mozilla,

Heroku,

PayPal,

NPR,

Obama for America,

Transifex,

Native Instruments,

The Washington Post,

Twitter,

SoundCloud,

Kippt,

Readability,

and Federal US Institutions.

People generate millions of dollars of value through open source software. It's only fair that the people making that software are incentivized to keep doing so.

> It's only fair that the people making that software are incentivized to keep doing so.

Give me a break. The incentives that coaxed popular open source authors to create their projects in the first place is still there. If people feel compelled to give money for something that was designed to be free, that's great. But I've yet to see anything that suggests that people will stop making OSS if they aren't given $50 a week.

It's not about them not working on OSS if they don't get money for it.

It's about them being able to work on OSS 30+ hours a week instead of 8 hrs a week if you (and many others) give 'em a few bucks a week.

I really hate the implication that end users are obligated to pay or "tip" open source developers.

How can a software developer be butthurt that he didn't make money off his product when it's his own fault for giving it away for free? Every organization you listed would have gladly paid money for the requests package, had the author not chosen to give it away for free. Just like they paid for MS Office, Windows, Photoshop, Oracle, and countless other software products.

It's almost embarrassing that there are software developers so clueless that they'd give their product away and then whine about how they need money and deserve to get paid. Not that I'm implying that's happening here.

It's so silly that open source advocates will demonize Oracle, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, ... for making money off their software, then turn around and whine that they're not making money. Who's fault is that? Nobody forced them to opt out of the economic system.

I release a lot of my code as open source under a very permissive license. It's perfectly clear to me that anybody can take my code and use it to make a ton of money and not owe me a dime. If I weren't okay with that, I wouldn't release the code.

This is a nice gesture, but I do get the impression that the amount being donated to each developer is way too small for many developers to even bother signing up for gittip.

if everyone using those products gave this small amount, you will be amazed how it will quickly rack up.

This is just the beginning, Gittip is still young, it has room to grow.

Money is money. It all adds up.

Depends on the developer, but in the case of jashkenas we're trying to give him $15.50/week, which is $806 per year - certainly nothing to sneeze at! That's almost a new Macbook Air! Or, if he's so inclined, a large yearly donation to the charity of his choice.

There is definitely a snowball effect though. Once I signed up for Gittip people started to give me tiny amounts (like $0.25/week). It built up-and-up over time and now I'm getting a non-trivial amount of money per week, which is awesome! It's helping to pay for all of my hosting costs and then some.

This kind of supports parent's point. If the creator of CoffeeScript, Backbone.js and Underscore.js only gets 806$/year, us unknown developers will probably get the equivalent of a cup of coffee per year. That being said, I do hope Gittip becomes more popular.

Hundreds (thousands?) of companies use jashkenas's work -- if each gave anywhere ~$1k/year then it'd easily pay for a full-time salary for him. Less prolific developers will obviously receive less, but still a significant amount, especially if many companies pitch in.

That's true - although that should be an incentive to write and release good Open Source code! Even if a single person gives you $0.25/week (the minimum amount) you'll get $13/year. We're attempting to give most developers at least $1/week - and I should emphasize that this is only from Khan Academy. Just because we're giving this amount it doesn't mean that these devs won't get money from other sources. I, personally, receive donations from a couple dozen users on Gittip with a wide variety of amounts (most being in the $0.25 range).

It's very defeatist to give up before even trying ("only" a cup of coffee). Why not aspire to more?

This message is very confusing for me.

I'm happy that you're finding personal benefit from Gittip. If it allows or helps you to keep providing great work to the community, that's excellent for everyone.

However, the numbers you quote are not good. $13 is an amount that a Bangladeshi garment worker earns in a week or so. It's nobody's aspirational goal to earn that in a year.

It may be the case (in the wider population) that such disproportionately small rewards actually discourage contributions compared to volunteerism, as it provides a (very bad) point of reference to compare the value of open source work to paid commercial work.

Imagine if we got some Bangledeshi garment workers on Gittip.

Naturally - but there are extremes and it's still the very beginning. There are definitely people earning very little (arguably EVERYONE is earning very little - even the top people are receiving just over minimum wage in the U.S.). Up until now there hasn't been a tool to have this consistent weekly donation for Open Source contributors. But given the growth that we're seeing on Gittip I hope that we can get to the point where people are seriously considering quitting their jobs to work on Open Source full time. It's doubtful that this will affect me now -- but I would've killed to have had this back in like 2004-2006.

The old reality (people giving money to Open Source projects /developers sporadically) was bad. The new reality (consistently giving small amounts of money via Gittip) is better. The future (large amounts of money, equivalent to a paid job, in a consistent manner) will be even better. I'm pushing Gittip because I see it as the best way to bring that future about. It'll take a lot of work but it needs to happen - for the benefit of all Open Source developers.

The point is that Gittip is in its infancy. I agree that most OSS developers aren't going to make a ton of money. I never viewed Gittip as a way to get paid as much as I view it as a way to support.

Chad's goals for Gittip are much larger than paying people to write code. But all big ideas start somewhere. I'm an eternal pessimist and I can say that Chad is on to something really big with Gittip. Not sure anyone knows exactly what it is yet though.

Cool, but if I can (eventually) increase the amount I'm receiving on GitTip to $60/year, there's my playground instance on DigitalOcean paid for.

Totally agree. Another thing is people like jashkenas don't even need that kind of money while regular open source devs working on smaller project might but they only get a few cents which makes the system mostly useless for everyone. As a dev myself of a few moderately successful open source projects, I don't even bother with gittip. I just do it for me and fun and that's it.

Imagine if something like this allowed them to quit their jobs, so that they did need this money, and work on open source projects full time. That's the goal.

Gittip is designed to grow slowly and shrink slowly. It's designed to be relatively stable over the long term so that you can depend on it to pay your bills. There are three ways for "unknown" developers to receive significant money on Gittip:

1) When a famous developer accepts tips despite the fact that they don't need them, and then regifts them to "unknown" developers that are known to them, perhaps as the people behind the scenes on the projects they're famous for.

2) When you set up an (opaque) project account such as ReadTheDocs has done: https://www.gittip.com/readthedocs/. ReadTheDocs can split that under the hood however they want.

3) When you set up a (transparent) team account and everyone on the team gets to take some of the money given to the team. This is a relatively new feature, see: https://medium.com/building-gittip/eba0a27825b8.

Again, though, funding will always grow slowly. Gittip is for the long term.

I would like to offer a contrarian view. Gittip is a nice initiative, in the "thank you for developing this project" kind of way - but I doubt anyone believes they can (or will be able to) pay the rent with donations paid through it. I wrote a post on this subject a couple of months ago, title "Open-source can't live on donations alone" [1].

I also don't subscribe to the notion that open-source should only be about the love - if companies like MySQL and Red Hat can make it into a huge business, and with the immense value open-source provides to the software industry, open-source developers should be treated as first-class citizens, not relegated to volunteer work late at nights, while doing their real job during the day.

Of course I'm biased, since I'm the founder of a company who's making that change happen. We started Binpress [2] to help developers build profitable businesses like MySQL and Red Hat around their open-source code. We do it by providing them with a platform for adding a commercial layer over their open-source code (whether it's self hosted or on GitHub, etc.), through commercial licensing and by providing customization, integration and support services.

We are a distribution marketplace, similar to the appstore or Steam but for open-source code products. We already have many developers making silicon-valley salaries working exclusively on their open-source projects - and we're just getting started. We've been bootstrapped (and profitable) for 2 years but are now closing our seed (after going through the 500startup program).

If any of this makes sense to you, you are welcome to reach out to me at eran@binpress.com (I'm Eran, the CTO and co-founder).

[1] http://www.binpress.com/blog/2013/04/14/open-source-cannot-l...

[2] http://www.binpress.com

Idea... Let's come up with some semi-standard language to include in contacts for client projects to request an optional fee to pass along to open-source projects used. Something like, "we recommend 1% of the development budget be allocated for contribution to open-source projects (blah, blah, blah)." It's easy to expense fees for software licenses, but there is no mechanism for open-source contributions. There should be.

I don't want to be critical of what is a small step in the right direction, but it does feel like such a very small donation. $5/week is, well, nothing. A developer at Khan probably earns $2000/week, and has an over cost to Khan of probably $2500/week at least.

I bring this up because I feel that if gittip optimizes towards that, then people will follow their lead. The right amount for a company with a wage bill of $3m/yr (back of the envelope based on figures in the article) to give back to OSS cannot be $6k/yr.

So one step in the right direction, and thanks Khan for doing that, and I'd love to see the next step being companies donating about 10x that each.

I think the core challenge is convincing OSS developers to redirect their attention from asking for donations -- which empirically are not sufficient to sustain OSS developers -- to selling things which larger enterprises can buy.

As a (hypothetical) team lead at BigCo, it isn't within my discretion to award $500 to an OSS project, but I can put a $500 training course or software license on my purchasing card on my own authority.

As a (no-so-hypothetical) business owner, it is highly unlikely that I'll ever donate $10,000 to a computer programmer, but I can trivially write that check -- and expense it -- for e.g. a support contract for a technology core to my business.

I had an excellent exchange with Chad recently on twitter (and then Github Issues) where we went through a transient GitHub OAuth issue that Github ended up acknowledging via email as being an error on their side. I feel much more confident in him and the gittip service where initially I felt some hesitation and doubt about the trustworthiness of the service.

I think there are a few things that are awesome about the Gittip model and a few things that are flawed:

Awesome things (1) fills a huge need (2) we should be in the habit of giving back (3) promotes long-term thinking

Bad things (1) dependent on CC processing (2) weekly only (3) A bit too much Github lockin.

what payment method besides CC would you like to see? Bitcoin? ACH?

Since you ask, I happen to run my own asset-backed digital currency w/ an open REST API. See profile.

I found the web site and block a little light on details. As in, there were none at all. It's not clear what benefit the Evergreen digital currency has over any other currency. Is it centralized? What does "secure" mean? What is it backed by?

Nice looking site - except for the text/background contrast. Very pretty and I enjoyed the video. Evergreen looks like a polished app experience.

However, like the previous commenter, I too am curious about what the assets are and what kind of security measures it takes.

At the moment we are sorting through some legal issues, but we plan to make this transparent very soon.

Influence is worth more than git tips in the OSS marketplace. I can make more in an hour from an employer then I can in an entire year on gittip.

I'd rather have "star" or "follower" - those are things that can be meaningful in my career.

That said, I wonder if this model makes sense in countries where these dollar amounts have a more meaningful impact on your life.

Can someone explain to me why Gittip is called that?

I've never looked into it before because I assumed it was related to Git/Github and was thus some complex Git-related method of moving money around.

Here's whit537 explaining the name at PyCon 2012.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=iv7...

Is Gittip any different than Flattr? Other than being explicitly linked to Open Source?

Nice initiative...

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