

Gittip: Open Source Financing - kracekumar
http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2012/8/27/open-source-financing/

======
Smerity
There are a few interesting things at work here.

Gittip seems highly popular amongst Python contributors at the moment. The top
four, other than the Gittip founder himself, are all primarily Python devs[1]
and will make $2,400 per year (~$50 per week) from Gittip if it remains
steady.

I wonder if Gittip is more popular within the Python community currently or if
this is just a skew in the numbers. I do know that Armin has been encouraging
people through Twitter to use Gittip if they feel his work is useful. I'd be
interested to see if/when Gittip becomes more popular in other programming
circles and what impact that has on payments.

The other thing is that >$2,000 is actually a significant amount of money. It
moves past "beer money" to "helps with rent" money and I expect this figure to
continue to rise over time, especially for star OSS contributors. On top of
that, it's also a form of social validation, especially when it is received
when one gives their time freely with no expectation of a return.

Over time I think we'll find Gittip will encourage encourage and enrich the
existing open source software model, not destabilise it as some people fear.
Imagine if successful start-ups decided to give a few dollars to the creators
of the software they use to make money. When your company is pulling in $10k
per month, giving $50 per month (~$10 per week) to the creator of [core
library] seems obvious and beneficial to both parties.

[1]: jnoller (Python/CPython), kennethreitz (Python Requests/Python for
Humans), mitsuhiko (Flask/Jinja2), alex (Django,PyPy,CPython),

~~~
japhyr
I think Gittip is starting out amongst the Python community because it is
built in Python. One of the signs Gittip is maturing will be its prominent use
by another dev community.

I appreciate the work prominent OS contributors have made, and I hope that
Gittip takes off.

~~~
izak30
I think it's network effects from it's founder as well. It is written in
Python, Chad is active with python stuff. I think that the Python community is
generous, but I doubt any more so than most other OSS communities. (Please
prove me right!).

~~~
jnoller
Speaking for direct personal experience: the Python community is _amazingly_
generous. In some ways, more generous and giving and understandable than any
other community I've been part of.

Of course, I'm grossly biased[1], and have been very lucky[2]

[1] [http://jessenoller.com/2011/07/28/thank-you-the-
impossibilit...](http://jessenoller.com/2011/07/28/thank-you-the-
impossibility-of-its-going-to-be-ok/) [2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=yflKOoAohEk#t=253s)

------
calvinspealman
I back four people on Gittip, and I plan to increase that. Both in the
amounts, and the number. I don't expect this money to go to anything specific.
I don't even expect it to go to something related to the things you all do
that give me reason to tip every week in the first place.

I do this because I want to. because I feel a need to give something to people
who every day make my life a little easier (the OSS projects I use), or now
and then do big and huge things (PyCon) that make my life better.

So, I want to do the same. I want your lives to be "a little bit better".
Maybe that means you can take one gig less and spend more time on your free
software projects. Maybe it means more time with the family, or friends, or
alone. Maybe it means an extra video game in the budget this month. Whatever
it is, that is your decision. It goes to something, I assume, that makes your
life a little better, a little happier, a little easier.

I'm selfish, you see. The less stress you have, the more energy you have to
put to the things that help me. It doesn't have to be direct. Go out and take
up a new hobby with the money, spend it completely unrelated to the open
source work you do. Because, when you come back home, you're going to feel a
bit refreshed, with a clearer head, and you're going to do something great.

~~~
whit537
Love it. Thank you.

------
benbjohnson
Having individuals tip is great but I think Gittip needs to support corporate
sponsors. That's where it could turn from $50/week for someone to something
quite a bit more substantial. I can see companies supporting projects on which
their company depends.

Case in point is VMWare supporting Redis. It's an extreme (they hired
@antirez) but I think a developer could make a living off a handful of
companies all pitching in a couple thousand dollars a year.

~~~
godDLL
Can't a GitHub account be a corporation? AFAIK it can.

So where's the holdup?

~~~
kingkilr
The big issue here is that they still have the same limit on the max they can
donate, $24 a week. Which, while fantastic! Isn't enough to move the need in
the way the parent poster was discussing.

~~~
jeremyjh
The way the site reads to me, the reason they have the limit is specifically
to throttle the influence from a single contributor. If that is where they are
coming from, I'd expect they would be reluctant to give more such power to
companies than to individuals.

~~~
whit537
Here's the strong statement of the idea:

"enable companies to sponsor people"

<https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/106>

At some point the question becomes, why not just take a job at a company with
a strong "open-source time" clause in your contract?

------
godDLL
I'm on gittip. Saw it here on HN, started tipping a few of my heroes
immediately.

I didn't think of it as OSS financing, but rather as a way of making Armin's
Friday beers-with-friends free for him. We'll see how it works out in the long
run, but if that is all that it ever accomplishes – I'll still be backing it,
because it's a _nice_ thing to do.

~~~
kingkilr
Honestly, the numbers for several of us (myself included) have well surpassed
funding our beers with friends. Which is amazing, a little bit scary, and
incredible. Unfortunately that leaves me in this awkward position where it's
not enough to replace my day job, but it's a large enough sum of money that I
want to do _something_ with it, specifically something related to my open
source work. If people are willing to try to fund my work, they should get
their money's worth, even if it's not my full time job. For now what I'm
considering doing is trying to use those funds to travel to various
conferences I wouldn't ordinarily make it to.

But I'm interested in hearing what people "tipping" think. What do you guys
want me (us) to do with this money until it's a full time salary?

~~~
jnoller
For me, personally, seeing gittip's come in is both a form of validation, and
also at a certain point it can "free" me from the choice some of us who are
full time employees, and then over-full time OSS/Community workers from having
to decide between:

1> Do community/OSS work - the former being, well, highly political, painful,
slow and yeah.

2> Drop the community work and just pick up paid contracts on the side to help
my family.

I'll always be part of OSS, no matter what - but there's a point at which the
time/benefit ratio (depending on what you're working on) becomes on of "how
much time can I rationalize working on this when I have other things to deal
with".

In my case, albeit a fairly unique set of circumstances, it's a choice between
time with my girls, medical bills, etc, etc and the choice to dedicate a lot
of time working on things a lot less sexy than code.

Sure, as others point out, I get paid a salary, I have a full time job. But as
I also point out in <https://www.gittip.com/jnoller/> \- I've got a lot of
other "full time jobs" not _including_ family time.

Just some thoughts - for you, using the funds to go to conferences, teach and
do things your current funds would not cover or allow you to (say, taking
unpaid leave to do a workshop someplace) would be a _fantastic_ use of it.

------
jeffreybaird
Most of us use some amount of open source software. I think it is in our
benefit to support those who make the effort to create and maintain the
software we use every day.

------
jahewson
I'm not sure who this is aimed at, open source software developers seem to
fall into two major categories:

\- employees at a company working on or using specific open-source software

\- passionate individuals (sometimes small groups, usually after an original
author gets a following)

The former are already paid, and the latter aren't in it for the money. The
psychology of money is such that when you introduce money into the equation it
becomes a "job", and people treat it as such. e.g. Would you help a friend
move house for free? Yes. What if they paid you $3? No...?

Who is this product for, and how will it avoid this paradox of getting more
out of people for "free" ?

~~~
jnoller
Like Alex, I replied elsewhere (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4439026>)
- I fall into both of your categories. However in the latter case (passionate
individuals) there's a lot of work out there that doesn't fall into "cool new
sexy code with lots of followers) and rather falls into the "sweeping the
floors, working out outreach and fighting stop energy in various things) that
are a lot less emotionally and tangibly rewarding (in fact, they're more
draining than coding) than shipping awesome code.

------
the_mitsuhiko
I can't stress enough btw that I am more than happy with what I get out
through gittip :-)

------
sciurus
If you find this topic interesting, there was a presentation at GUADEC from
Adam Dingle of Yorba (<http://www.yorba.org/>) about "New funding models for
open source software"

<https://lwn.net/Articles/511260/>

~~~
whit537
Cool! Thanks for the link. :-)

------
synparb
"Now if you look at the numbers it's not doing super amazing currently but I
believe that's because not enough people back it at the moment and for a while
that was mostly because getting money out of there was not yet easy enough."

The issue of getting money out seems to be solved:
[http://blog.gittip.com/post/30116848405/with-payouts-
gittip-...](http://blog.gittip.com/post/30116848405/with-payouts-gittip-is-
minimally-viable) (Posted previously:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4429225>)

~~~
whit537
Automatic payouts landed last week (which was week 12 of Gittip). Reminds me
to check whether the deposit cleared ...

~~~
whit537
It did! Woo-hoo! Thank you people! :D

Here's the page to connect a bank account if you have money to withdraw from
Gittip:

<https://www.gittip.com/bank-account.html>

If you're not in the US then you should add a +1 here:

<https://github.com/balanced/balanced-api/issues/23>

------
meatpopsicle
This website is important. Even in it's current stage, this is one of the
long-term solutions to the main problems of FOSS.

Kudos to the owner for dogfooding it.

------
debacle
At what point is Gittip going to be issuing 1099s for all of the individuals
it donates to?

~~~
enduser
IANAL. The IRS allows gifts (bona fide no-strings-attached gifts) from
individuals to individuals up to $13,000 per year with no tax required†. After
$13,000 it is the responsibility of the giver to pay taxes on the gift, not
the recipient. To be clear, the person receiving gifts can receive up to
$13,000‡ _per giver_ tax-free. There is no limit on how much a recipient may
receive as a gift without paying tax. gittip does not even approach these
limits, and if it did then the _giver_ would file Form 709, and there would be
no 1099.

†
[http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=108139,00....](http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=108139,00.html)

‡ married couples may collectively give up to $26,000 per recipient per year

~~~
whit537
Here's the ticket tracking the tax implications of Gittip:

<https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/96>

TL;DR: It's too early to tell. We've started contacting tax professionals and
don't have good answers at this point.

------
macco
What's with selling OSS? Let's say you provide the sources, but you sell the
software using the app stores of the plattform. It's basicly the business
model Red Hat uses.

I am askin' myself why software developers don't try this.

------
qzio
You don't need to insert money in order to be able to get money from the
flattr system.

