
Gittip at Khan Academy - digitalnalogika
http://ejohn.org/blog/gittip-at-khan-academy/
======
jashkenas
I've long felt conflicted about accepting tips through Gittip, but John's nice
argumentation here persuaded me to give it a try.

On the one hand, working on open source software (especially many years after
the original projects have shipped, and you've moved on to other things) is
really about the love -- a hobbyist's satisfaction of polishing a well-honed
tool.

But on the other hand, when so many successful businesses are able to use that
open-source tool to great effect, it can create a bit of a financial
dissonance.

I'm not sure if I'll keep the account open for very long -- for one thing, if
I end up back at the NYT towards the end of the year, I'll probably have to
close it -- but until then, let's see how it goes. Maybe it'll feel good in a
kind of dirty-capitalist-but-gift-economy kinda way.

~~~
jeresig
I'm really happy that you've signed up!

Amusingly I'm in a very similar boat to you. I'm fairly certain that almost
all the money that I'm receiving on Gittip is due to my work on jQuery - which
I haven't actively worked in quite a few years.

One way in which Chad explained it to me, that resonated, was that Gittip can
be better thought of as a "genius grant". People are giving you money not to
support a specific _thing_ (otherwise Gittip would be project-centric, not
person-centric) but to support YOU and the things you want to do.

It's kind of crazy because I'm fairly certain that I'm getting donations
because of my work on jQuery and not for my current side-project research into
Japanese woodblock printing - but people don't seem to mind! (And I've made it
clear on my profile what it is, exactly, that I'm working on right now and
what I'm using the money for.)

I have a full-time job at Khan Academy and I'm well paid so I don't need the
extra money - but it is appreciated. I'm re-donating a portion of the money
that I get. Additionally it's paying for my extra server costs for my side
projects and it's probably even paying for a good chunk of my monthly utility
bill. I've been trying to think of other ways in which I can use the money
that'll have a more obvious "money in -> using money -> output" pipeline but
I'm not sure what that is, yet.

Let's hope you'll be able to keep your account open and find good uses for the
money!

~~~
jashkenas
Hah. I'm afraid that -- between being currently funemployed, having just had
all of my worldly possessions (at least for this year) stolen out of the back
of my car last week, and discovering that travel insurance doesn't really
cover it very well ... I can certainly think of a few good uses for it ;)

I'm afraid that I'm still "actively" working on everything (except for Ruby-
Processing, which has been passed along), but it's all on a light simmer on
the slow burner. More excitingly, there's a new OSS project, still in the
early planning stages, which I'm pretty jazzed about.

Seriously though, thanks for the nudge. Much of the time, open source can feel
like a slog through a bottomless pit for inane GitHub issues, with the
occasional diamond in the rough. Your article is making open source feel more
like a friendly love-in tonight.

~~~
whit537
Geez, man. Wow. I'm sorry. :-(

I can't believe I'm asking this, but what would it take for you to work on
open-source full time instead of going back to NYT in the winter? Is that
something you would even want?

What would it take to keep you funemployed forever?

~~~
jashkenas

        > Is that something you would even want?
    

I don't think so. Having a balance between short-term deadline driven stories
and slower, larger, more greenfield projects is a _terribly_ nice luxury for a
programmer to have. I also find it hard to imagine a more interesting and
enlivening day-to-day environment than a national newsroom.

I talk a little bit more about it here:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3HanxEFFlk](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3HanxEFFlk)

... and Derek's got a great post from this morning about the job as well:
[http://thescoop.org/archives/2013/07/16/why-develop-in-
the-n...](http://thescoop.org/archives/2013/07/16/why-develop-in-the-
newsroom/)

~~~
whit537
Fair enough. Thanks for the links, and for giving Gittip a try. :-)

------
whit537
I can't think of a better reply (from Gittip's point of view) to yesterday's
"Money and Open Source": [https://medium.com/open-source-
life/d44a1953749c](https://medium.com/open-source-life/d44a1953749c). Thank
you, jeresig and Khan Academy, for the huge vote of confidence, investing in
open-source via Gittip! :D

------
Lerc
The granting employees the $5 tip a week idea is pretty good. There are a lot
of businesses out there that see the value of open source but don't currently
fund development. There are certainly companies out there where the reason for
not funding is more logistical than financial. Giving employees the ability to
send money to where they see it can do the most good would be a great way to
target worthy projects.

With sufficient freedom, I can see groups of employees organise themselves to
coordinate development of features that are specifically important to their
work.

~~~
ianterrell
This seems like something Gittip.com could offer as a feature: employees can
log in and pick who to contribute to, and the company account they're
associated with automatically makes the payment.

Reduce that logistical hurdle to a signup. :)

~~~
whit537
Andy Weissman from USV suggested that on a skype call we had. Unfortunately
that was before I started doing open calls so I can't link to it. :-/

Ticketed:
[https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1153](https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1153)

~~~
krichman
> doing open calls

I like gittip and your philosophy. I think you've convinced me to sign up.

------
jmduke
An abridged list of organizations using Kenneth Reitz's python requests
package:

Her Majesty’s Government,

Amazon,

Google,

Twilio,

Mozilla,

Heroku,

PayPal,

NPR,

Obama for America,

Transifex,

Native Instruments,

The Washington Post,

Twitter,

SoundCloud,

Kippt,

Readability,

and Federal US Institutions.

People generate millions of dollars of value through open source software.
It's only fair that the people making that software are incentivized to keep
doing so.

~~~
jlarocco
I really hate the implication that end users are obligated to pay or "tip"
open source developers.

How can a software developer be butthurt that he didn't make money off his
product when it's his own fault for giving it away for free? Every
organization you listed would have gladly paid money for the requests package,
had the author not chosen to give it away for free. Just like they paid for MS
Office, Windows, Photoshop, Oracle, and countless other software products.

It's almost embarrassing that there are software developers so clueless that
they'd give their product away and then whine about how they need money and
deserve to get paid. Not that I'm implying that's happening here.

It's so silly that open source advocates will demonize Oracle, Microsoft,
Apple, Adobe, ... for making money off their software, then turn around and
whine that they're not making money. Who's fault is that? Nobody forced them
to opt out of the economic system.

I release a lot of my code as open source under a very permissive license.
It's perfectly clear to me that anybody can take my code and use it to make a
ton of money and not owe me a dime. If I weren't okay with that, I wouldn't
release the code.

------
warp
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.

~~~
jeresig
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.

~~~
olalonde
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.

~~~
jeresig
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?

~~~
ronaldx
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.

~~~
jeresig
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.

------
pytrin
I would like to offer a contrarian view. Gittip is a nice initiative, in the
"thank you for developing this project" kind of way - but I doubt anyone
believes they can (or will be able to) pay the rent with donations paid
through it. I wrote a post on this subject a couple of months ago, title
"Open-source can't live on donations alone" [1].

I also don't subscribe to the notion that open-source should _only be about
the love_ \- if companies like MySQL and Red Hat can make it into a huge
business, and with the immense value open-source provides to the software
industry, open-source developers should be treated as first-class citizens,
not relegated to volunteer work late at nights, while doing their _real job_
during the day.

Of course I'm biased, since I'm the founder of a company who's making that
change happen. We started Binpress [2] to help developers build profitable
businesses like MySQL and Red Hat around their open-source code. We do it by
providing them with a platform for adding a commercial layer over their open-
source code (whether it's self hosted or on GitHub, etc.), through commercial
licensing and by providing customization, integration and support services.

We are a distribution marketplace, similar to the appstore or Steam but for
open-source code products. We already have many developers making silicon-
valley salaries working exclusively on their open-source projects - and we're
just getting started. We've been bootstrapped (and profitable) for 2 years but
are now closing our seed (after going through the 500startup program).

If any of this makes sense to you, you are welcome to reach out to me at
eran@binpress.com (I'm Eran, the CTO and co-founder).

[1] [http://www.binpress.com/blog/2013/04/14/open-source-
cannot-l...](http://www.binpress.com/blog/2013/04/14/open-source-cannot-live-
on-donations-alone/)

[2] [http://www.binpress.com](http://www.binpress.com)

------
8ig8
Idea... Let's come up with some semi-standard language to include in contacts
for client projects to request an optional fee to pass along to open-source
projects used. Something like, "we recommend 1% of the development budget be
allocated for contribution to open-source projects (blah, blah, blah)." It's
easy to expense fees for software licenses, but there is no mechanism for
open-source contributions. There should be.

------
pbiggar
I don't want to be critical of what is a small step in the right direction,
but it does feel like such a very small donation. $5/week is, well, nothing. A
developer at Khan probably earns $2000/week, and has an over cost to Khan of
probably $2500/week at least.

I bring this up because I feel that if gittip optimizes towards that, then
people will follow their lead. The right amount for a company with a wage bill
of $3m/yr (back of the envelope based on figures in the article) to give back
to OSS cannot be $6k/yr.

So one step in the right direction, and thanks Khan for doing that, and I'd
love to see the next step being companies donating about 10x that each.

~~~
patio11
I think the core challenge is convincing OSS developers to redirect their
attention from asking for donations -- which empirically _are not sufficient
to sustain OSS developers_ \-- to selling things which larger enterprises can
buy.

As a (hypothetical) team lead at BigCo, it isn't within my discretion to award
$500 to an OSS project, but I can put a $500 training course or software
license on my purchasing card on my own authority.

As a (no-so-hypothetical) business owner, it is highly unlikely that I'll ever
donate $10,000 to a computer programmer, but I can trivially write that check
-- and expense it -- for e.g. a support contract for a technology core to my
business.

------
gazarsgo
I had an excellent exchange with Chad recently on twitter (and then Github
Issues) where we went through a transient GitHub OAuth issue that Github ended
up acknowledging via email as being an error on their side. I feel much more
confident in him and the gittip service where initially I felt some hesitation
and doubt about the trustworthiness of the service.

~~~
whit537
:D

------
Jd
I think there are a few things that are awesome about the Gittip model and a
few things that are flawed:

Awesome things (1) fills a huge need (2) we should be in the habit of giving
back (3) promotes long-term thinking

Bad things (1) dependent on CC processing (2) weekly only (3) A bit too much
Github lockin.

~~~
jareau
what payment method besides CC would you like to see? Bitcoin? ACH?

~~~
Jd
Since you ask, I happen to run my own asset-backed digital currency w/ an open
REST API. See profile.

~~~
singlow
Nice looking site - except for the text/background contrast. Very pretty and I
enjoyed the video. Evergreen looks like a polished app experience.

However, like the previous commenter, I too am curious about what the assets
are and what kind of security measures it takes.

~~~
Jd
At the moment we are sorting through some legal issues, but we plan to make
this transparent very soon.

------
tarr11
Influence is worth more than git tips in the OSS marketplace. I can make more
in an hour from an employer then I can in an entire year on gittip.

I'd rather have "star" or "follower" \- those are things that can be
meaningful in my career.

That said, I wonder if this model makes sense in countries where these dollar
amounts have a more meaningful impact on your life.

------
AndrewDucker
Can someone explain to me why Gittip is called that?

I've never looked into it before because I assumed it was related to
Git/Github and was thus some complex Git-related method of moving money
around.

~~~
dowskitest
Here's whit537 explaining the name at PyCon 2012.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=iv7...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=iv7B7D9iIRI#t=76s)

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stuartmemo
Is Gittip any different than Flattr? Other than being explicitly linked to
Open Source?

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Pavan_
Nice initiative...

