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.
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).
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.
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! :)
It's pretty common to see psychopaths gang up on people threatening their ways, such as pure altruists. Heck, the whole mankind history is about it. Don't be surprised if that was the reason he was targeted.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One-off payments are nice but aren't a good basis for working on something full-time. My fosspay service allows people to pay one-offs, but those aren't very helpful for sustainability.
> Thankfully I make enough today to break even on open source (that is, my infrastructural costs are paid for).
What kinds of infrastructural costs do you have to deal with when working on FOSS (that don't apply to software development in general)? Do you host services of some kind?
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™.
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!
Although this is not the first time I came across the names Gratipay and Gittip, I never really knew what it was. It looks like you're doing amazing things though. Do you have an RSS feed or something to follow you, so I (and others) will be notified when Next Time™ is there?
In my experience HN actually does a pretty good job of filtering signal from noise. All of our attempts to _force_ something to the homepage failed, but when we have had genuinely interesting news to share (such as this) we glide there effortlessly. The take-away for me is to focus on doing genuinely interesting things! :^)
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!
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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)
It's also bad that they don't encourage (or better, require) projects to release under free/libre/open terms. If the funding comes from patronage, then there's no justification to still be restrictive.
Also, Patreon themsleves are proprietary, have standard proprietary terms, and have VC-funders that expect a return which affects the potential future (unlikely to ever become a co-op or anything etc). And they strongly emphasize exclusive rewards which doesn't work well for fully free/libre/open projects (but at least they don't require such rewards).
It's unfortunate but understandable why Patreon became dominant. That said, they could easily be worse.
Key thing is that they aren't actually that good a solution to the inherent freerider problems in FLO works… it's still just unilateral donations after all, same as all membership support has been forever.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
And THANK YOU to all of you who believed in Gratipay enough to freely give and receive $1.1 million over the past five years—all of the companies (MaxCDN, andyet, Stripe, Balanced, Digital Ocean, COS, Khan Academy, Klarna, Heroku, Crate.io, etc., etc.), the individuals (chrisdev, ncoghlan, adambrault, bruceadams, campadrenalin, jedgar, rdegges, therabidbanana, etc., etc. etc.), the open source projects and programmers (alexpott, DrupalCoreTeam, jmervine, bundler, jeresig, substack, zzzeek, bbatsov, mitsuhiko, kennethreitz, ericholscher/RtD, etc., etc.), and, yes, even the provocateurs (it's not your fault we didn't manage our community well).
Thanks for giving us a shot. Sorry it didn't work out. Best of luck!
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.
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.
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.
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.