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Comment by warp | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

Imagine if we got some Bangledeshi garment workers on Gittip.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Money is money. It all adds up.

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