

Help fund Read the Docs - jacobian
http://ericholscher.com/blog/2012/sep/20/help-fund-read-docs/

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forsaken
Direct link to gittip: <https://www.gittip.com/readthedocs/>

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feydr
dood - just make that shit a service - I've talked to a # of companies that
were looking for something like that and were dismayed that they couldn't just
sign up w/a credit card, seriously

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SoftwareMaven
I agree. In fact, if played correctly, I could see it as an acquisition target
of a company like Github.

You can make money and serve the open source community at the same time.

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whit537
> In fact, if played correctly, I could see it as an acquisition target of a
> company like Github.

GitHub already has pages and wikis and is heavily invested in GFM and is
killing it in the commercial market. Why would they want a non-Ruby reST
product?

> You can make money and serve the open source community at the same time.

And Gittip might turn out to be a way to do that.

Maybe Eric wants to be a person, not an acquisition target.

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amccloud
<http://getsentry.com/> Is already doing it. Sentry is opensource
<https://github.com/getsentry> and hosted service.

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whit537
True, Sentry is a good example of a successful open source business model.
GitHub itself is probably the best example of a company that's #winning at
open source. They don't give their source away, but they give their service
away. But it's pretty well-established that there are business models that can
subsidize open source, isn't it?

The interesting thing about Gittip is that there's no strings attached for
receivers. We've already got a company advertising itself on the Gittip givers
leaderboard (<https://workforpie.com/>). But there's a decoupling of corporate
interests from personal interests on Gittip that I think is worth continuing
to explore. Even if Gittip were filled with corporate donors, their
contributions would still be anonymous to the receivers. There's no strings
attached. To me, that's new and interesting.

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mryan
> They don't give their source away, but they give their service away.

github is not open source - they have a closed source service that is
available for free, with limitations. Unless you meant that they are building
a business based on an open source piece of software, which is a little
different from e.g. Sentry.

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whit537
They don't just use an open source piece of software (RoR), they use the open
source community to build street cred that they then cash in to score their
real customers.

Don't get me wrong: I love GitHub. It's a fantastic product and an inspiration
to me. Instead of paying $7/mo for private repos, I choose to give back by
gittiping members of the organization:

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

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lifeisstillgood
You'll get my cash as soon as I get into work.

A brilliant use for gittip - and a brilliant service from readthedocs

Please drop me a line for some corporate sponsorship talks too - would be
interested my details on my profile. Cheers

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hcarvalhoalves
What about advertising? The audience is _very_ specific, it could be a good
match for some ad networks.

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izak30
I would rather give $1/week than see dice.com ads.

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hcarvalhoalves
Why? Wouldn't you like seeing ads for, eg, Python events? New Relic? Heroku?

That's what I mean by ads.

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izak30
I wouldn't fight it or turn them off, just saying what I would rather have.
The space is almost certainly most valuable to recruiters (see sourceforge
ads)

