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Comment by ronaldx | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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