Gittip at Khan Academy • Hacker News Board

Re: Gittip at Khan Academy

#51

Post by patio11 » Wed, Jul 17, 2013, 1:50 AM UTC

pbiggar wrote: post #47

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 $…

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.

Re: Gittip at Khan Academy

#52

Post by singlow » Wed, Jul 17, 2013, 2:03 AM UTC

Jd wrote: post #40

jareau wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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.

Re: Gittip at Khan Academy

#53

Post by voltagex_ » Wed, Jul 17, 2013, 2:07 AM UTC

ronaldx wrote: post #22

jeresig wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, personal…

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 populatio…

Cool, but if I can (eventually) increase the amount I'm receiving on GitTip to $60/year, there's my playground instance on DigitalOcean paid for.

Re: Gittip at Khan Academy

#54

Post by whit537 » Wed, Jul 17, 2013, 2:12 AM UTC

jashkenas wrote: post #35

whit537 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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 ... and…

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

Re: Gittip at Khan Academy

#55

Post by jlarocco » Wed, Jul 17, 2013, 2:39 AM UTC

jmduke wrote: post #7

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…

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.

Re: Gittip at Khan Academy

#56

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jul 17, 2013, 3:17 AM UTC

jlarocco wrote: post #55

jmduke wrote: post #7

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…

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, Phot…

[deleted]

Re: Gittip at Khan Academy

#57

Post by krichman » Wed, Jul 17, 2013, 3:25 AM UTC

whit537 wrote: post #25

ianterrell wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :)

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

> doing open calls

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

Re: Gittip at Khan Academy

#58

Post by pytrin » Wed, Jul 17, 2013, 4:51 AM UTC

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...

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

Re: Gittip at Khan Academy

#59

Post by jashkenas » Wed, Jul 17, 2013, 6:18 AM UTC

ilaksh wrote: post #46

jashkenas wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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),…

Can we get a hint about the new project that is in early planning stages?

Hint: "Will It Blend?"

Re: Gittip at Khan Academy

#60

Post by jashkenas » Wed, Jul 17, 2013, 6:21 AM UTC

patcon wrote: post #41

whit537 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a go-round on this with Gabe Stein of FastCo.Labs. Since Gittip is anonymous in the particulars I thought maybe that would get around the journalistic conflict of interest, but Gabe articulated how that probably wasn't sufficient because there's always the threat of finding out (as with jashkenas and Khan in this case). Queued up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OerW0Q_2_7o#t=32m03s Not sure yet what, if anythin…

What if there was a mode that folks could set their accounts to, where they couldn't cash out and could only pass it on to other users? People could go into that mode when they were in a job that frowned upon gifts, and it could be displayed prominently so that allow donors were aware :) Perhaps the system could even convert dollars to some sort of non-monetary "token", which they could pass along to someone who coul…

I'm afraid that wouldn't help in this case. The conflict of interest here is the possibility of any appearance of favoritism -- whether you happen to be on the giving or the receiving end of the equation doesn't make much difference.

There are sections in that guidebook about donations to political parties. Gittip forwarding would be a similar, albeit grayer, area -- donating to (say) prominent folks from Microsoft Research would be iffy. More so if you then proceeded to work on any Microsoft-related stories in the future.