

An idea for Github to make more money - umrashrf
http://umairashraf.me/2012/07/an-idea-for-github-to-make-more-money/

======
zoobert
I am the developer of Gmvault (<http://www.gmvault.org>) an open source tool
having its development hosted on github
(<https://github.com/gaubert/gmvault>). I really like the idea of crowd
funding and would like my tool to be founded like that if possible as I would
like it to be open source and available to anybody while providing enough
money to run the development server. I even more like to idea of having
bounties on bugs as this would help me prioritizing features and bug fixes
while funding the development.

However since the release of the tool in may I had around 20000 downloads but
less the 20 persons supported the development by donating something. I still
hope that having such a facility directly embedded in Github would allow
people to be a bit more philanthropic and rewarding for the developers as
often developers would probably want to continue full time the adventure of
developing a product or a library.

~~~
alttab
What if I gave you $150,000? Would you make the product to my specifications?
Does this illustrate why this could be a channel to disrupt the spirit of open
source software?

Imagine Github does implement this. Now you have a bunch of coders who want to
work on "open source" projects for money, hoping to get backers as if they did
a Kickstarter project. Or maybe it could start an OSS Github "gold rush."

Now that we have a bunch of money-hungry developers, it'd be pretty easy to
de-rail or commandeer projects simply by donating a large portion of money.
Now imagine a non OSS competitor starts contributing. Multiple things can
happen:

1) Any innovation or development of features could be easily copied and
incorporated into competitive projects for sale.

2) A developer gets "hooked" on that donation money and starts favoring the
large donors' requests over others.

3) These requests could sabotage the quality or the focus of the project.

4) The donor could pull funding at this point and collapse development and
support of the project.

Full blown conspiracies aside, the whole point of OSS was to open up
development for everyone to grow and learn, and to remove software development
from the corruptible influence of money.

I think others on this thread had a great idea, make it a "tip", and make it
anonymous. We would still have to limit "tips" because anyone can make a huge
tip and then e-mail a "ransom" letter to the developers to do stuff if they
want to continue getting large tips. The previous ordered list applies here.

Again, I'm going to an extreme and likely this sort of abuse wouldn't be
rampant in a system like that. But involving money at all directly into the
process sounds like it could do more harm than good.

If you want to take donations, you can do a Kickstarter to get up and running
and then take some sort of "beer" or micropayment service on your website.
Github integrating this into their offering seems irresponsible to the OSS
community at large.

~~~
mindcrime
_and to remove software development from the corruptible influence of money._

What? I've been part of the F/OSS world in one capacity or another for
something like 15 years now, and I've never heard _anybody_ posit that before.
Yes, some F/OSS advocates are somewhat anti-commercial, but to say that "the
point" of OSS is about removing the influence of money, is a pretty novel idea
from what I can see.

Consider this: The FSF specifically say, in the GPL FAQ[1], that you can
charge money for GPL'd programs. The Open Source Definition (OSD)[2] has as
it's first plank:

"The license shall not restrict any party from _selling or giving away_ the
software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing
programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a
royalty or other fee for such sale."

And programmers employed by various corporations contribute a significant
amount of code to the ASF, and to the Linux kernel, etc. Look at the Apache
OOo proposal[3], for example, and now how many of the initial committers were
from IBM or Red Office.

[1]: <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html>

[2]: <http://www.opensource.org/osd.html/>

[3]: <http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/OpenOfficeProposal>

~~~
alttab
Thanks for the information. I admit I'm not fully versed. I don't know much
about enterprise OSS, but I do know that IBM created Eclipse as a way to get
people onto their development tools and Java technology. Not to say that's
even a bad thing (although I'm no fan of Eclipse but thats irrelevant), just
that I guess I don't want to see things like Github motivated by money, when
its worked so damn well without it.

What I don't want to see is programmers begging for "donations" so they can
work on their project. Clearly my example was a little overblown, but if its
not broken why fix it?

Thanks for the info though - as I'm sure I'm not the only one that learned
from it.

------
pixie_
The developer audience is small and targeted. Kickstarter woos the masses. I
doubt GitHub would make much money off this idea. The bigger problem is who
gets the money from backers. Projects can have multiple contributors, projects
can also be forked. There is no way this system could fairly pay the right
contributors without massive complexity and pissing people off.

~~~
secoif
I don't see the problem. The money goes to the owner of the repo to distribute
as they see fit.

If you contribute code to an OS project, and then someone makes money from
that OS project, do you feel pissed off that you didn't get a cut of that
money?

If you trust people to build you free stuff, why do you suddenly not trust
them to get paid for it?

edit: clarified

~~~
whit537
May I plug <https://www.gittip.com/> up here, too? Gittip lets you pay money
to developers on GitHub. It's only a month old. Three weeks ago we moved $30,
and last week we moved $380.

<https://www.gittip.com/about/stats.html>

Right now I'm personally grossing $65 a week on Gittip, for example.

<https://www.gittip.com/whit537/>

It's all developed as openly and transparently as possible. It's not a
traditional for-profit model like GitHub.

------
ZenJosh
I think you make a good point, but I think it'd make a lot more sense for
Github to facilitate donations to projects rather than adding a bunch of
crowdfunding stuff. Id much rather donate cash to a project in development,
much in the same way I can donate my time, than 'fund' it.

~~~
umrashrf
You're right. Unless the funds invested returns anything against it, this
wouldn't be investment but donation. I am more interested in Github to find a
way out of Kickstarter to create a whole new revenue stream for them.

~~~
jack-r-abbit
I'm not sure I would consider the Kickstarter crowdfunding to be "investing".
I think "investor" has a certain level of formality attached to it. Investors
usually get some stake or something. Most of the Kickstarters I've seen give
t-shirts, stickers, access to early betas, pre-orders, etc. Giving to a
Kickstarter project seems barely more than a donation. I just think of it as
an incentivised donation. If GitHub was to introduce some such feature, it
would probably need to have similar incentives as well (bug fixed, feature
added, etc) although straight donation (or tip jar or what every you want to
call it) would be possible too.

------
salman89
Github's core offering is a hosted git solution. I'm not sure how a crowd
funding add on fits into that core offering.

Like another user already said, more money doesn't necessarily mean a boost in
development speed/quality. I think there is something in "Kickstarter for
developers" (there are bounty based sites that work like this), but I don't
believe it really fits with the product/value prop.

I still think Github's biggest potential for revenue is from the enterprise-
sized to medium-sized development shops, by way of creating software
collaboration tools. Git can be hosted anywhere, but there are reasons why
developers like Github beyond it being a repository.

~~~
meric
You mean like Atlassian?

~~~
sequoia
The atlassian stack (in particular Fisheye) is a Github Enterprise competitor,
yes.

------
aditya
They used to have automatic Pledgie integration[1] -- guess it didn't work out
too well...

[1] <https://github.com/blog/57-getting-paid-the-open-source-way/>

~~~
umrashrf
That was good but I think it wasn't tightly integrated.

------
rushabh
I think this is brilliant for Open Source projects, and running an Open Source
project I instinctively felt this is a great idea.

There might be issues if the project has contributions from a large number of
unconnected developers (on how to split the amount), or alternatively a
project getting a decent amount of funding may put off certain developers, who
then might not want to contribute for "free".

On the other hand, it could become a marketplace for contractors. That would
be cool. Each project could make a small proposal and invite bids from
freelancers, who could all bid on github.

Yeah, lots of interesting possibilities.

------
benjaminwootton
Something slightly different....

It would be nice if Github gave you the option of adding $1 - N$ onto your
membership fee, and then distributed that between the open source projects or
authors that you follow.

~~~
sequoia
I think Kachingle was trying to do this for online media generally.

~~~
whit537
Yeah, and they got burned because they were staunchly opt-out. That is, they
would collect money on your behalf without your permission.

------
justindocanto
I had low expectations for this, but I actually like the idea. facilitating
some sort of donation, fund, back, etc. income for the developers making the
software could be good.

chosing whether to give to the main dev, a specific dev or equally spread that
donation amongst all devs contributing to a project would make it a lot more
fair too. i would use this functionality with a doubt.

~~~
umrashrf
Yeah. Most of the time when I am working on something and if that's a big
thing to get turnaround on, I loss my level of energy that I had when I
started it because there is no incentive or quick turnaround.

------
kngl
There is already a service to give money to some github user:
<https://www.gittip.com/>

~~~
rushabh
That's interesting but most people don't know about it (and the sums are very
small too). An integrated service would take things to a much different level
much much more trust that the money actually goes to the developers.

~~~
whit537
Hey there! I'm the lead developer on Gittip. May I say a few words?

First, I think GitHub could definitely make some money doing what OP suggests.

Second, Gittip is starting with GitHub but I hope it will grow beyond GitHub.

Third, sums are growing. Gittip is a month old. We moved $30 three weeks ago
and moved $380 last week. We're set to move $480 tomorrow--more if you
contribute! :-)

Fourth, the pricing model is different. If GitHub were to do like Kickstarter
they'd take a 10% cut. Gittip is priced to cost.

Fifth, Gittip drinks its own Kool-Aid. The people developing Gittip (i.e., me)
are looking to make their living through Gittip itself, not from a 10% cut.

Sixth, Gittip is developed in the open ... on GitHub. Jump in! :D

<https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com>

~~~
bmelton
I got here from the other thread posted
here:<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4236756>

While I generally love the idea and think well of it, your fifth point is
actually a bit of concern. I'd rather you took a small percentage and were
able to maintain things.

What if you're moving hundreds of thousands of dollars a week, but are still
only getting $200 and change for yourself? Will the site close? As an 'opted-
in' developer, there goes my revenue stream.

I'm not saying it isn't noble, but while I can appreciate you relying on it
for your revenue stream, and would love to get to a point where I could rely
on it for mine, there's a confidence factor in the service that doesn't
necessarily interact with either of those.

It might not mean anything to anybody else, but I'd have a hard time relying
on that until I knew it wasn't going to implode, and that probably means
periodically checking your number.

Another small concern I have with it are actually seeing the totals. If you
get to $600 on your page, that's $2400(ish) a month. I worry that figure might
discourage people -- "Oh, he's already 'rolling in it', I'll tip somebody else
that needs it more." I feel like it almost looks like charity at that point.

It'll be interesting to see how things actually shake out though.

------
samstarling
The problem here is the massive assumption that if the developers of a project
had more money, then that would directly relate to more time/effort being
spent on the project. That's not always true.

------
colinhowe
A bounty on issues would also be interesting... sometimes you have an issue
you can't personally fix and isn't critical enough to get a contributors
interest. $100 might get their interest though :)

~~~
dhx
Bug tracking software has played with the idea of bug bounties for many years
now. However I challenge you to provide a link to a public bug tracker where
these bug bounty features are successfully used.

For further reading, there exists plenty of discussion and analysis
surrounding bug bounties for security vulnerabilities. Bounty rewards are
typically a token gesture that don't even begin to cover the real costs of the
developer/researcher. And for open source projects -- many developers are
writing code for fun, as a challenge or as an experiment. Are intrinsically
motivated developers going to respond positively to extrinsic motivators?

------
lloeki
The news about GitHub raising money and this article came right at the time
when I was contemplating moving to BitBucket. While comparing the latter's
plans with GitHub ones I couldn't help but wonder how Atlassian is turning any
profit on BitBucket (the plans seem quite cheaper, and I already wonder how
GitHub turns out to be profitable)

~~~
krunaldo
BW is cheap, storage is cheap. They probably run filesystem that utilize dedup
or/and do it in their applications storage logic.

------
lincolnwebs
This seems predicated on GitHub needing additional revenue. I don't think
their announcement signalled that at all. GitHub accepted an investment
partner. My assumption is that they got excellent terms since they are very
cashflow-positive, they hope to IPO one day, and they require investment-savvy
advisors.

------
jack-r-abbit
I could see this as a possibility but honestly that sounds like a lot of work
for GitHub when there is already a means to crowdfund your project. I don't
see what is stopping people from just starting their own Kickstarter project
to support the project they are storing on GitHub.

------
rb2k_
They could just partner with [0]flattr, that way I could also subscribe to my
favorite libraries.

[0] <http://flattr.com>

~~~
whit537
Flattr supports flattring GitHub profiles, I believe via a browser extension.

[http://blog.flattr.net/2012/02/winter-update-github-
tweets-e...](http://blog.flattr.net/2012/02/winter-update-github-tweets-
extensions/)

~~~
rb2k_
I have it in the back of my head that there is a way for the site to get a
small percentage of the revenue if they 'properly' integrate it. At least I
think Instacast, the iOS podcasting client, used that feature.

