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Gittip, Year Two

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Re: Gittip, Year Two

#41

Post by lmm »

jacquesm wrote: post #39
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 m…

There's an argument that the reason Linux beat 386BSD is the pragmatic decision to make it easy to run a dual-boot system on a single-disk PC.

Re: Gittip, Year Two

#42

Post by yungchin »

chroma wrote: post #10

Let me preface this by saying: I want Gittip to succeed. I really want them to succeed. I would love to be able to spend my time getting paid by a community to develop open source software. However... those growth curves look linear, if not sigmoid. More importantly: >The Gittip team receives $20,339 per year (averaging the past ten weeks). There are 39 people splitting that money. $500 per person per year? That's no…

Curves can also look like that if we look at them at the wrong scale, so maybe it's too soon to jump to conclusions.

There are more questions to ask: how many people have heard about gittip? If they're not donating yet, would they reconsider if they read this post ("social confirmation")? How about if you served them other specific calls to action? How many more haven't heard of gittip yet? Are those two orders of magnitude in there?

Re: Gittip, Year Two

#43

Post by ama729 »

jacquesm wrote: post #36
gerhardi wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lac…

> (Most prominent: not to limit the future chances of the children).

Did they specify a reason? There is quite a lot of good schools there IIRC.

Re: Gittip, Year Two

#44

Post by jacquesm »

These are the hardest. See, when a company or project is dead on arrival there is not much to do, you bury it, do a post-mortem and move on.

If a company is successful then you ride the wave as far and as long as your stamina will let you and then you hopefully pocket a nice chunk of cash.

But when you're in the middle, too big to die, too small to succeed it gets very hard. Killing it off feels completely wrong, pushing it feels like you are adding to the opportunity cost with a relatively small chance chance of eventual success. It's a very practical illustration of the sunk-cost fallacy in all its gruesome glory.

Personally I hope that gittip will continue to grow and that the team will stick with it. They serve a very important role, pioneers in uncharted territory. And even if a lot of those pioneers ended up dead in creeks with arrows in their backs they pointed the way, showed what works and what does not. And they still have a sufficiently large shot at success if they stick with it. But if they'd pull the plug I would not fault them.

Let's hope there will be a 3rd instalment of this article, where gittip grew steadily for the 3rd year in a row and it became profitable. That would be the best way to see this go.

Re: Gittip, Year Two

#45

Post by jacquesm »

ama729 wrote: post #43
jacquesm wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lac…

> (Most prominent: not to limit the future chances of the children). Did they specify a reason? There is quite a lot of good schools there IIRC.

Yes, the schools are fine. But not as good as in the countries surrounding it, and since moving within europe is cheap and relatively easy why not go for one of the best. I've yet to meet a parent that did not want to give their children the most opportunity possible. Combined with the limited opportunity in the local economy, the fact that the quality of life is still far behind nearby countries I really don't fault them.

It's a pity for the former sovblock countries, they still experience a lot of brain-drain due to causes like these and that likely will continue for a long time. Those wounds inflicted by 5 decades of mis-management are quite serious and healing them will take a long time. Possibly a multiple of how long it took to inflict them in the first place. And the further east you go the worse it gets.

Re: Gittip, Year Two

#46

Post by MateuszMucha »

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…

The thing is that it's crucial for us to have people like RMS. Even if their main projects aren't as successful as their pragmatic "competition", the society as a whole benefits from them being a hard-core idealists. They're the ones who keep reminding us about the values we otherwise would have forgotten (or at least we wouldn't have thought about them as much).

I've had a similar discussion with my wife just last night. She's a landscape architect and deals a lot with people who's purpose in life is to save existing trees and plant new ones. She complained that they're so over the top in their actions that they're often doing more harm than good (to the cause). It's similar in other niches - animal rights activists do some nasty things to fur coat owners, etc.

I believe that these traits (a strong belief in something and overzealous approach) are most often inseparable. We can either have these people care a lot and spread the word by doing things the way we don't agree with or don't have anybody who gives a shit.

I don't agree with Stallman on many issues and I'm eternally grateful to him for what he's done. I don't agree with tree huggers because they make other people laugh at the whole thing. But I'm grateful, because without them nobody would care. Same with animal rights fighters, same with GitTip folks.

Thank you, Chad Whitacre, the World is a tiny bit better because of you.

Re: Gittip, Year Two

#47

Post by PaulHoule »

peteretep wrote: post #29
akanet wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is referring to https://twitter.com/shanley , a moderately well known and divisive figure in the tech feminism scene.

Three of the top four receivers appear to fit the label "moderately well known and divisive figure in the tech feminism scene".

I think more seriously

https://www.gittip.com/noirin/

has stuff on her profile that directly deprecates her husband. I don't anything about this case, but I'd say in general it makes me uncomfortable that somebody is bringing up a personal conflict on a platform like this.

Re: Gittip, Year Two

#48

Post by aianus »

jacquesm wrote: post #36
gerhardi wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lac…

I moved to Canada from Romania as a child and I don't think it was much of a win.

In exchange for more economic opportunity, I grew up with no family (other than mom and dad) which I think has stunted my personal growth a lot. Other people seem to care a lot about their families and getting married and having children but all of those things are really foreign to me.

Actually I'm not even sure about the economic opportunity bit; I saw loads of Romanian college students as interns at my last SV internship.

I'm not poor but I think being selfish and alone might be worse.

Re: Gittip, Year Two

#49

Post by whit537 »

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…

Great feedback, thanks! Starting to process it here ...

I've ticketed "Building Gittip is confusing as a first impression"

https://github.com/gittip/building.gittip.com/issues/63

Re: Gittip, Year Two

#50

Post by jacquesm »

aianus wrote: post #48
jacquesm wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lac…

I moved to Canada from Romania as a child and I don't think it was much of a win. In exchange for more economic opportunity, I grew up with no family (other than mom and dad) which I think has stunted my personal growth a lot. Other people seem to care a lot about their families and getting married and having children but all of those things are really foreign to me. Actually I'm not even sure about the economic oppo…

Emigration is super tough, especially on kids. But growing up with just your mom and dad is actually not that rare. I have a super large family but almost 0 contact with them.

What stops you from moving back to Romania?

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