Comment by jballanc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jballanc | Hacker News Reader

It seems to me that Gittip is making the same mistake that Gnu/FSF have made: the most effective change comes one step at a time. Ostensibly, the primary goal of Gittip is to create an economy of Open Source work. But instead of focusing on this goal, they are also (from the article):

* running a non-traditional "open" company

* shunning investors not willing to work with an "open" company

* only doing "open" interviews

Stallman deserves much credit for starting the FSF movement, but there's a reason that Linux has succeeded where Hurd has barely even shown its face. Linus has always been a pragmatist. In the end, we have a world where software development is much more "Open" today than it was 30 years ago, but who deserves more of the credit? Stallman the zealot? or Linus the pragmatist?

I love Gittip's primary mission, but I hate that they'd rather see this primary mission fail than compromise on any of a list of additional secondary goals. Regardless, I think that 5-10 years from making a decent living doing open source work will be far more feasible than it is today, but who will make that happen? Gittip? or Kickstarter/IndieGoGo/Crowdtilt/Patreon/Bountysource?

The thing is that it's crucial for us to have people like RMS. Even if their main projects aren't as successful as their pragmatic "competition", the society as a whole benefits from them being a hard-core idealists. They're the ones who keep reminding us about the values we otherwise would have forgotten (or at least we wouldn't have thought about them as much).

I've had a similar discussion with my wife just last night. She's a landscape architect and deals a lot with people who's purpose in life is to save existing trees and plant new ones. She complained that they're so over the top in their actions that they're often doing more harm than good (to the cause). It's similar in other niches - animal rights activists do some nasty things to fur coat owners, etc.

I believe that these traits (a strong belief in something and overzealous approach) are most often inseparable. We can either have these people care a lot and spread the word by doing things the way we don't agree with or don't have anybody who gives a shit.

I don't agree with Stallman on many issues and I'm eternally grateful to him for what he's done. I don't agree with tree huggers because they make other people laugh at the whole thing. But I'm grateful, because without them nobody would care. Same with animal rights fighters, same with GitTip folks.

Thank you, Chad Whitacre, the World is a tiny bit better because of you.

:-)

You, too!

> there's a reason that Linux has succeeded

I think you mean GNU/Linux? ;)

You are asserting that the real goal of Gittip is to create a new economy, but that's not Chad's goal. You say that this makes him like Stallman, but it also makes him like Linus.

Linus has made it clear that his primary goal isn't to extract revenue, and in many ways he doesn't care much about traditional success metrics. Instead he wants to maximize values like "fun". Chad wants to maximize other values, like "generosity". Is it up to us to say that's wrong?

Also, Gittip has a model of self-funding. Even funding a team of people with different talents. Linux doesn't; it's organized around a code repo, and depends on enthusiasts and enlightened corporations to keep contributions flowing. If you're a marketer or designer who wants to contribute to Linux, you're going to have a lot more trouble. You only think of Linux's model as pragmatic because it's been around for so long, and you've gotten used to the deficiencies.

And when it comes to openness, in big open source projects like the Linux kernel, it's considered rude to have any significant discussions off the mailing lists. I think Chad's insistence on making everything public just updates the principle to modern tools like video chats. I used to work for the Wikimedia Foundation, and we did similar things, so the community could act as a watchdog. Our "full disclosure agreements" were difficult for partners sometimes, but they didn't preclude alliances with Apple or Facebook, or donations from Google.

Now, from where I sit, Chad might have taken the openness tactic a little too far. Some discretion is appropriate, especially when people are just starting to form a relationship. And contributors need privacy. To their credit, the Gittip community is currently reconsidering some of the rules around openness, and Chad has been admirably open to that -- another way in which he's not a Stallman.

Hadn't heard of Wikimedia's FDAs, sounds awesome! Do you have a link for more info?

After I made this comment this I realized that the best thing might be to connect you with the people who do bizdev at the WMF. ;) I've already sent them an email, I'll be in touch soon.

Also, the 'full disclosure agreement' is just an inside joke. But, a real-world example. Facebook was creating topic pages, and they wanted to seed them with Wikipedia content. While our bizdev person was arranging that, they refused to sign NDAs. So every time they visited Facebook, the people at FB erased every whiteboard they might see coming or going.

I think that might give you a good indication of what you're up against when it comes to openness and corporate partnerships, but also some hope that other arrangements are still possible.

> but who deserves more of the credit? Stallman the zealot? or Linus the pragmatist?

I would argue that it needed both. If Linus would have had to start by writing a C compiler or the basic set of unix utilities that Linux could be built with/on top of the project would likely not have succeeded in the way it did.

Remember that we also had Bill and Lynne Jolitz' 386BSD at that time and if Linux would not have taken much of the energy out of the *BSD ecosystem we'd likely be using that on most of our servers now.

The timing was right, Linus is a nice guy, penguins are cute, history is the way it is, so I won't make any attempts to revise it. But let's not overdo it either.

There's an argument that the reason Linux beat 386BSD is the pragmatic decision to make it easy to run a dual-boot system on a single-disk PC.

I don't think any of these are problems.

When I want to start using a system like this, as I'm sure everyone does, I spend a little bit of time reading the about pages and working out if this is a company whose values align with my own.

I was very excited about Flattr, but then I read the small print and decided that they weren't for me.

When I found gittip, I read the details and thought all of the aspects are laudable. I gittip an extremely small amount, but will continue to do so and will gradually increase it as I become aware of more projects that deserve my support on it.

The vision to create a new kind of "open" company is interesting in itself and is directly related to many of the reasons that I feel motivated to use the service.

> Ostensibly, the primary goal of Gittip is to create an economy of Open Source work

Which is why it will never work

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