
The End of Gratipay - marvinpinto
https://gratipay.news/the-end-cbfba8f50981
======
clone1018
Back in 2015 Gratipay hosted it’s second ever retreat; the idea was a full
weekend of hacking and building with all of our normally-remote members of the
team. The thing you need to know about Chad is he is exceptional at bringing
people together and spreading his passion. I arrived a bit early to the
retreat and was tasked by Chad to cook dinner. It sounded easy enough; I need
to make dinner for 10 or so people, something easy like sandwiches would work
right? That was when Chad brought out the giant oven-sized dutch oven, I
couldn’t believe we would be making so much food for 10 people! I was peeling
potatoes for hours! Turns out that night we fed over 50 amazing people from
Chad’s life. All of his friends, neighbors, churchgoers, family, peers, and
even random people he had inspired at the local pub.

And every time I hung out with Chad it was like this, people from all over the
world, in all sorts of backgrounds and difficulties made it a point to be
Chad’s friend.

Chad, you may think you didn’t get to change the world with Gratipay, but you
did, you are the catalyst that will change the world for the better. Thank
you.

~~~
dorfsmay
Thanks for confirming something I suspected. During the crisis a few years
ago, everything I read about him seems to point that he is a reasonable person
and coming from the right place, with the right intention. I had a major issue
how people ganged up on him. There were lists circulated at the time calling
people to block anybody who was following him on twitter etc... (got blocked
by several people because of this, took me a while to figure out why).

~~~
stillkicking
Chad linking to Geek Feminism Wiki to explain the "Gittip Crisis" is a
testament to how effective the disinformation was, as that page repeats the
lies used to whip up the crowd against him in the first place, including
misrepresenting discussion on this very site:

>Shortly thereafter, Chad Whitacre, the founder of gittip, responded
positively to (CW: Hacker News) a comment on Hacker News calling gittip "a
joke dominated by professional victims" because women use it.

Actual comment:

>Yelling on Twitter and demonizing men for existing is not "promoting empathy
and equality". Begging for legal money for your civil lawsuit is not
"sustainable crowd funding" (hint: what is she being sued for? it doesn't
say.). Sorry Gittip, but your site has turned into a joke dominated by
professional victims.

It was never about women, and always about how "women in tech" is a glaringly
obvious smokescreen to funnel money from real contributors to posers and
grievance mongers. A gold star if you can guess which notorious "women in
tech" activist this was about.

~~~
whit537
Deep breath, man. I've finally reached a place where I can let others tell
their side of that story without feeling threatened by it. I worked hard to
get to this point! Don't you go internalizing bad feelings on my behalf! :)

------
Sir_Cmpwn
I've been trying to figure out how to get paid to do open source for a long
time. The popularity of my open source projects has changed over this time,
but this might give you an idea of the effectiveness of each approach if you
need an alternative.

I used Gittip for a while, and it was a really nice platform, and netted me
$5-15/month if I recall correctly. I left after some regulatory issues added
an annoying amount of mental gymnastics to actually get money out of it. Later
I built my own self-hosted platform for getting tips [1][2]. This tends to net
me $20/month consistently, with occasional bursts due to one-time donations.
Also, I know of at least one other installation in the wild, it's being used
to support some Mastodon instances.

A few months ago, I set up a Patreon [3] where I earn almost $200/month. This
is by far the most successful approach I've seen yet, though it rustles my
jimmies a bit to be beholden to a proprietary, centralized service. In the end
I'm still not making enough to work on open source full time. Thankfully I
make enough today to break even on open source (that is, my infrastructural
costs are paid for). Hopefully I can figure something out for full time
eventually. It's _hard_.

Many thanks to the folks at Gratipay. It was an uphill battle for sure but
they fought the good fight.

[1] [https://drewdevault.com/donate](https://drewdevault.com/donate)

[2] [https://github.com/SirCmpwn/fosspay](https://github.com/SirCmpwn/fosspay)

[3] [https://patreon.com/sircmpwn](https://patreon.com/sircmpwn)

~~~
hinkley

        I've been trying to figure out how to get paid to do open source for a long time.
    

Don't. Having supplemental income makes your life better in ways that quitting
your day job won't. It reduces the size of your N months of living expenses
and makes it easier to fill up that fund.

When you can walk away from a job it makes a big difference in your experience
of it. Feeling trapped in a job you're not enjoying makes you even more
unhappy. Feeling like nobody values what you do is rough. Not being able to
afford to take a job doing something you'd love or really believe in, because
it doesn't pay enough or has a 70% chance of cratering, is an experience I
would spare anyone if I could.

But get over the hump and you're your own person. You can say no if they ask
you to do something unethical. Take risks. Invest in yourself.

Keep taking the extra money. Put half of it in the bank. Keep some emotional
distance from your day job. Enjoy the freedom.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
I think everything you said is valid, but largely tangental to the subject of
getting paid to do open source. I should clarify that I want to get paid to
work on _my_ open source projects, not just any arbitrary project. I probably
wouldn't take a pay cut to work on someone else's FOSS project.

~~~
hinkley
No I get that. But when it’s your day job then you are obligated. All those
nice qualities as a pressure valve are gone and now it is your source of
stress.

I’ve seen too many people start a Patreon and then their output drops like a
rock. It used to be something they did for fun or love of craft and with a
nice bonus of some extra money. Now it’s a job. One they can’t get out of.

Whoever said do what you love and you’ll never work a day was a mean
sonovabitch who destroys dreams. For a lot of people familiarity breeds
contempt. Do your second most favorite thing and protect the precious one.

------
whit537
Thanks for the send-off, everyone. Feels right somehow to hit the HN homepage
one more time before putting Gratipay to bed. So many lessons learned, already
scheming about Next Time™.

See you down the line! :D

~~~
praneshp
This is a startup shutting post on HN, and everyone here is focussing on how
you are an awesome person. That's a first in the few years I've been here.
Good luck with the next thing!

~~~
whit537
Yeah it's a little awkward tbh. There are so many other people that also put
heart and soul into Gratipay! See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15614009](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15614009).

------
gw
I met Chad when I lived in Pittsburgh and we had great times regularly hacking
on Gratipay in a coffee shop. Chad would teach regulars how to code by making
them do small pull requests on the project. Even when Patreon swooped up the
market he had a profound sense of why the project still mattered -- Gratipay
was open source, took no fees, and was funded entirely on its own platform.
Chad you are a badass, cheers man!

~~~
whit537
<3

------
schmichael
> provocateurs continued to take advantage of Gratipay’s overly welcoming
> nature, until we had to admit that yes, online communities really do require
> moderation.

I really appreciate Chad's honesty, humility, and transparency in all of this.
I'm really glad to have these words in writing from someone who put so much
effort into trying to do the right thing. I hope these words are heeded not
just by the startups of today and tomorrow, but also by the megacorps now
finding themselves unable to explain to an angry public what's going on on
their platforms.

~~~
forsaken
I think it's a lesson that the entire tech community is learning slowly (and
marginalized people have been shouting about for years, to their credit).

------
traverseda
At the end of the "gittip crisis" it seems that they capitulated to the
demands of a group of users who felt unsafe sharing information about how much
money they made. Users who had mostly already left. I think this was a big
mistake, as the "leader-board" features provided important social-proof that
gratipay worked. That you could make money from it. Tracking how much money
projects gave to other projects was good UX, it meant you could feel good
about giving money to a large meta-project, because you knew it was passing
that money down to smaller projects it depended on.

After they made the decision to remove leaderboards I mostly lost interest.

~~~
userpass
They could have made it opt out.

~~~
Changaco
We did. In fact the option to hide one's income still exists in Liberapay
today, more than 3 years after the initial implementation.

------
kawsper
I used Gratipay for a while, and I even contributed with one or two commits, I
was also hanging around the IRC chatroom.

I am so incredibly envious of the passion, work-morale and ambitions that I
saw in Chad Whitacre, what a great guy. I am sad that Gratipay shut down, and
I am sad for all the roadblocks the project have had, I used it to donate to a
few projects and it was great for that.

I hope Chad will find something worthwhile to do after Gratipay.

~~~
whit537
Thanks for contributing and hanging around, and for the kind words and for
using Gratipay to donate!

------
nodesocket
Startups are ridiculously hard. The biggest mistake young founders and
companies make is going heads down in code for 3, 6, 12 months without
marketing and sales. I've been there and failed.

What is the market? Is it a good one? Open source while incredible, is damn
difficult to build a proper business.

I'll reiterate my stance that the best products with the best technology often
times don't win. That doesn't mean that you should not strive for perfection
in products, it just means there is more to the game than that.

~~~
Permit
This comment seems almost entirely inapplicable to the article. Where did you
get the sense that the founder[s] spent too much time working on the
technology?

There are a number of reasons for which Gittip/Gratipay may have failed, but
"Focusing too much on the tech" doesn't seem to be one of them.

~~~
swang
Probably because of this paragraph from the article:

> At Gratipay we’ve spent the past year gearing up to relaunch with a renewed
> focus on open source. However, funding open source is almost entirely about
> marketing, and we spent most of the past year writing code instead. File
> this one under, “open source needs all the skill sets,” but also, “startups
> need all the skill sets.”

~~~
nodesocket
Bingo. @Permit go back and read it again.

------
minimaxir
Patreon has cornered the market on funding projects which otherwise have not
much revenue potential. I’ve been seeing more and more open source projects
switching to that model. (The only bad thing about Patreon is no option for
one-time contributions)

~~~
mattbk1
They also take a cut of the proceeds, and add overhead for creators/developers
(who have to create perks). The Gratipay/Liberapay model has anonymous
donations so people receiving donations don't feel beholden to specific
donors.

~~~
r3bl
> (who have to create perks)

Do they? I've seen pages getting a solid amount of money without having any
perks.

~~~
mattbk1
Do you have examples? I'm not sure how to search for this.

------
XR0CSWV3h3kZWg
Wow they were really committed to resolving their issues in public. It's
pretty interesting to go through their github issues.

It's amusing to contrast the difficulty of tipping another internet user
before cryptocurrency and after. Due to regulatory cost it's still rough for a
company to act as a conduit using cryptocurrencies, but accept a tip from
another internet user is as easy as (BTC): 18bsU4fM14AbiQ6aXSRc7XSnduT75cCigX

------
traverseda
Liberapay seems pretty good, a lot like older gittip in UX. Leaderboards and
all. I'd be interested in hearing more about it, why it split from gittip,
etc. I may use it instead of patreon, but there's not a lot of information
about, well, how it was founded.

I suspect I will be switching my matrix donation from patreon to liberapay. It
would have been nice to know that was an option.

~~~
mattbk1
Here's why Changaco left Gratipay and a bit on starting Liberapay:
[https://changaco.oy.lc/blog/goodbye-
gratipay](https://changaco.oy.lc/blog/goodbye-gratipay).

Liberapay is a solid fork, and there doesn't seem to be any personal issue
between Chad and Changaco. We've even implemented a direct migration tool for
Gratipay users to move to Liberapay.

~~~
whit537
Changaco is awesome. We met in person for the first time last year (it was
post-fork) and it was a great time.

~~~
Changaco
Thanks Chad, the feeling is mutual. I'm actually going to Lille again in 2
weeks, I can already say that it won't be the same without you and Jess there.

~~~
whit537
<3

------
notyourday
Pro tip: do not listen to non-customers. Do not cower to non-customers. Do not
appease non-customers.

------
rawnlq
It's pretty interesting when companies implode in a way that's clearly visible
on a graph.

The Digg traffic stats look similar in summer of 2010 after their
controversial redesign where you can clearly see their users leaving for
reddit:
[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2005-06-01%202...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2005-06-01%202011-06-30&q=digg,reddit)

------
forsaken
They were one of the pioneers in the space of sustainability around open
source, which led to many of the wonderful projects we have today. Thanks to
Chad for putting so much work in over the years towards a worthwhile mission.

~~~
whit537
Thanks for the kind words! I won't pretend I didn't put a lot of work into
Gratipay over the years, but the reality is that so did a lot of other people.
The most meaningful part about Gratipay for me is and has been the community
building it. Gosh, I want to start naming names but then I'll forget someone.
Aww, heck ...

Thank you clone1018, co-owner of Gratipay, LLC! Thank you mattbk, jessa,
rohitpaulk! Thank you edoverflow and the whole (new) security team! Thank you
dmk246 and kaguillera! Thank you Changaco and zwn and chrisdev and rummik and
seanlinsley and bruceadams and duckinator and colindean everyone else from the
Gittip days! Thank you techtonik and aandis and rorepo and wyze and oakes and
joonas and patcon! Thank you nobodxdobon and shurcooL and dowski and tshepang!

!m _

~~~
whit537
Okay, now tell me who I forgot (I"M SORRY!!!!)! :D

~~~
whit537
Thank you pjz and everyone who ever used or hacked on Aspen.

Thank you jordanmessina and steveklabnik and joeyespo and everyone who put us
on HN way back at the start. Thank you marvinpinto for putting us back here
one more time. ;)

Thank you everyone who funded my/our Gratipay habit directly by giving to
myself or the Gratipay team on Gratipay. Especially UkuleleRod.

Thank you Jessica and Leah and Miriam and Sammy and Ruthie and all of our
friends and family for absorbing so much stress over the years.

------
kzisme
Having helped out very little with this project - it makes me sad to see it
go. Chad is a great guy and means well in all that he does.

I wish him the best :)

~~~
whit537
Thanks, kzisme! Was good to have you around while it lasted, maybe some day
we'll get to meet in person! Cheers! :^)

~~~
kzisme
I'm in the Burgh fairly regularly! Keep in touch!

------
SwellJoe
Well, dang. I'd just recently setup an account with Gratipay for our OSS
projects. It's not brought in any money, but it seemed like the most
transparent and OSS-friendly platform for raising funds.

Sorry to see it go. Funding OSS is a very, very, hard problem.

~~~
whit537
Ahhh, sorry for the surprise. :( Best of luck!

~~~
SwellJoe
It's fine. Shit happens. I've had moments where I've seriously considered
shuttering my OSS business (and I've closed a previous one, though for reasons
other than money). Best of luck to you, as well.

------
gargarplex
Can anyone recommend a network where you can post open source jobs? Not an
open source job board, but a live job board with open source jobs :)

~~~
buovjaga
Here's one: [https://www.fossjobs.net/](https://www.fossjobs.net/)

I've sometimes posted LibreOffice and Mozilla jobs to it.

~~~
gargarplex
Thanks. I posted an Apache Impala freelance gig, just waiting on the manual
review process for now. :-)

