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Gittip, Year Two

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Re: Gittip, Year Two

#31

Post by sspiff »

chroma wrote: post #19
sspiff wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> $40k per year is quite close to minimum wage in California. Exactly. In California. If you want to live off of what is basically donations for community work, you might want to relocate to a much cheaper place. Eastern Europe or South-East Asia are nice places to live on a tighter budget. I donate a small amount every week myself, though I find it hard to make a bigger commitment to it.

Living in cheap places is fun when you're young, but eventually you take on more responsibilities and your body fails you. Are eastern europe and southeast asia known for their health care? Are dentists cheap there? Most importantly, are they good places to raise a family? I can totally get behind you when it comes to arbitraging cost of living, but not everyone can do that. At best, one could live in an inexpensive…

Providing for a family doesn't mean always choosing the most money. If you can have a more relaxed schedule, work load or work-life balance, while having an adequate income, this might be more valuable to your family than having a more generous income but less time for your partner and/or children.

I'm young, and don't have any children, but I find that the most precious commodity/currency is time, not material wealth.

Of course, I'm speaking from a position of relative comfort, living in a nation with a comprehensive social security system and a decent middle-class income and a degree in engineering. People who have more trouble making ends meet might have a very different view.

Re: Gittip, Year Two

#32

Post by jballanc »

It seems to me that Gittip is making the same mistake that Gnu/FSF have made: the most effective change comes one step at a time. Ostensibly, the primary goal of Gittip is to create an economy of Open Source work. But instead of focusing on this goal, they are also (from the article):

* running a non-traditional "open" company

* shunning investors not willing to work with an "open" company

* only doing "open" interviews

Stallman deserves much credit for starting the FSF movement, but there's a reason that Linux has succeeded where Hurd has barely even shown its face. Linus has always been a pragmatist. In the end, we have a world where software development is much more "Open" today than it was 30 years ago, but who deserves more of the credit? Stallman the zealot? or Linus the pragmatist?

I love Gittip's primary mission, but I hate that they'd rather see this primary mission fail than compromise on any of a list of additional secondary goals. Regardless, I think that 5-10 years from making a decent living doing open source work will be far more feasible than it is today, but who will make that happen? Gittip? or Kickstarter/IndieGoGo/Crowdtilt/Patreon/Bountysource?

Re: Gittip, Year Two

#33

Post by infruset »

I was really surprised to see they don't accept Bitcoin. I feel like it is the perfect use case and would probably help them gather some more enthusiasm from the community.

However, one could also contend that Bitcoin might very well kill them..

Re: Gittip, Year Two

#34

Post by untilHellbanned »

infruset wrote: post #33

I was really surprised to see they don't accept Bitcoin. I feel like it is the perfect use case and would probably help them gather some more enthusiasm from the community. However, one could also contend that Bitcoin might very well kill them..

Completely agree. Dogecoin too. I'm surprised more crowdfunding sites don't accept crypto. Here's one that does https://onarbor.com.

Re: Gittip, Year Two

#35

Post by kmfrk »

jve wrote: post #8

Took me some looking around to find a link on bottom of the (gittip.com) page to actually find out what gittip does. First thought was - is it a way to get paid by submitting patches through GitHub? No, actually thats a site where you give/receive donations to people on Twitter/GitHub/Bitbucket

Surprisingly, I hear, by far, the most about gittip from feminist circles; it's easy to explain the reason for using gittip in that context.

It's great that people use gittip for that, but I also think the barrier to understanding gittip is easier for people who support feminist causes than for most other demographics.

I've tried using gittip as a single-donation tip jar for people who fixed or forked broken repos, but having to use the subscription-like format makes that too much of a hassle in most cases, unfortunately.

I assume it's for tax or regulation reasons that this option is not available? It'd have been great to use in my GitHub issues, if someone helps me out with a problem there.

Re: Gittip, Year Two

#36

Post by jacquesm »

gerhardi wrote: post #24
chroma wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Living in cheap places is fun when you're young, but eventually you take on more responsibilities and your body fails you. Are eastern europe and southeast asia known for their health care? Are dentists cheap there? Most importantly, are they good places to raise a family? I can totally get behind you when it comes to arbitraging cost of living, but not everyone can do that. At best, one could live in an inexpensive…

Many of the eastern European countries have probably quite equivalent standards of treatment and facilities for lower price tag than in California. I know quite well some people from Estonia, Poland, Latvia and Czech republic and none have really complained about their childhood, healthcare etc. Obviously the atmosphere must have been quite different during the communist regime in the 1980s but nowadays things are di…

Hi. I'm currently in Romania, and even though I manage to stay afloat here quite nicely I'd hate to have a family here with kids growing up in this environment. Poland is doing ok and improving steadily, the Czech republic is also quite manageable. But compared to say France, Belgium, the UK, Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands there is still a significant difference.

Romania:

For instance, infrastructure here is lacking (but internet is quite good), roads are bad, traffic is insanely dangerous, I'm positively terrified of getting into a road accident here. Medical services exist but it's cash up-front or you're in trouble. Older folks are living terrible lives (little or no social net, so tons of beggars on the streets). I would never want to live here with a family, and friends of mine that emigrated here with their kids from Canada have already packed up and left again, their explicitly stated reason is they don't want their children to grow up here. Romania is a beautiful country, it has tons of potential, I know a large number of really nice people here but there is much work to be done and a long way to go to put an end to all the corruption, to fix the terrible state things are in and to get good healthcare.

Poland:

Poland has done very well, in the last two decades the changes have been enormous. Proximity to Germany has definitely helped the Poles, America has also invested quite a bit of money there. And of course they have helped themselves, they collectively worked very hard to get out of the rut they were in at the end of the 80's. Infrastructure is improving, every time I visit I see new stretches of highway that come online, cities are slowly being cleaned up, there is more or less continuous progress. Healthcare is not super good but it will do. Raising children in Poland would definitely be a possibility.

Czech Republic:

My knowledge about the Czech republic is thin and mostly second hand, but I know two couples that were mixed nationalities that lived there, both have now moved to different countries in western europe (France and NL respectively). In one of those cases the parents explicitly stated they did not want to live in the Czech republic with children for a number of reasons, all of which sounded plausible to me. (Most prominent: not to limit the future chances of the children).

I have no experience with Latvia and Estonia so can't comment on those.

So I don't know how much direct experience you have with any of these countries but I would definitely hesitate to bring my children here, I would feel I'm doing them a serious dis-service.

Re: Gittip, Year Two

#37

Post by po »

I would suggest one thing that may be controversial, and I hope you take it as constructive criticism: Change the name of Gittip.

Maybe you've discussed this before somewhere but… The name suggests two things that I think hinder the service:

- This is a service for software developers only (git)

- A tip is a small amount of money in exchange for quality service

There is no reason to tie yourself only to software developers. There are a lot of other places where people may want to show appreciation for each other in an open way.

There is also no reason to associate yourself with tipping culture. Tipping causes many people anxiety and has power dynamics and cultural norms attached to it. Tips are supposed to be small and in exchange for service.

I really think a more abstract name would allow people to connect with it better.

Good luck with year three!

Re: Gittip, Year Two

#38

Post by kmfrk »

User9812 wrote: post #27
jve wrote: post #8

Took me some looking around to find a link on bottom of the (gittip.com) page to actually find out what gittip does. First thought was - is it a way to get paid by submitting patches through GitHub? No, actually thats a site where you give/receive donations to people on Twitter/GitHub/Bitbucket

Same thing here, I had no idea about this site, so I click their mission from the article. http://building.gittip.com/big-picture/mission Well, that made it more confusing, so I click process at the bottom of the above page. Now it sounds like it's a giant pool of money, anyone can volunteer for anything, and take some of that money. So, I can say I want to keep the elderly company and go play scrabble with them in t…

At least some of the pages are open source; I'm sure they wouldn't mind a pull request for some changes in language: https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/tree/ee8ebf663e74fb....

Re: Gittip, Year Two

#39

Post by jacquesm »

jballanc wrote: post #32

It seems to me that Gittip is making the same mistake that Gnu/FSF have made: the most effective change comes one step at a time. Ostensibly, the primary goal of Gittip is to create an economy of Open Source work. But instead of focusing on this goal, they are also (from the article): * running a non-traditional "open" company * shunning investors not willing to work with an "open" company * only doing "open" intervi…

> but who deserves more of the credit? Stallman the zealot? or Linus the pragmatist?

I would argue that it needed both. If Linus would have had to start by writing a C compiler or the basic set of unix utilities that Linux could be built with/on top of the project would likely not have succeeded in the way it did.

Remember that we also had Bill and Lynne Jolitz' 386BSD at that time and if Linux would not have taken much of the energy out of the *BSD ecosystem we'd likely be using that on most of our servers now.

The timing was right, Linus is a nice guy, penguins are cute, history is the way it is, so I won't make any attempts to revise it. But let's not overdo it either.

Re: Gittip, Year Two

#40

Post by yungchin »

po wrote: post #37

I would suggest one thing that may be controversial, and I hope you take it as constructive criticism: Change the name of Gittip. Maybe you've discussed this before somewhere but… The name suggests two things that I think hinder the service: - This is a service for software developers only (git) - A tip is a small amount of money in exchange for quality service There is no reason to tie yourself only to software deve…

How about this: it seems patron-age.org is available...
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