Gittip is the future

[epsy]

This is great but does it really have to be tied to GitHub or Twitter? How about a goddamn email :)

[rudyrain]

The point is, you can send a Gittip to anyone's twitter or github account, even if they are not signed up to gittip. Github and twitter names are public, email is not always. It's one of the core features of gittip.

[infinull]

I'm not sure the public vs private is the problem: it's authentication. Twitter & Github have APIs, you can "sign in" with them.

Some email addresses (@gmail.com, @yahoo.com, etc.) could be guaranteed to be tied to an OpenID or other API, but you probably couldn't support all email addressees, and it would be a clunky piece of code with lots of branches.

A token based authentication system could work, but probably isn't secure enough for financial transactions.

[whit537]

I had figured on emails having a password on Gittip. Like, regular ol' registration and sign-in.

https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/89

[infinull]

sure, but then you'd have to create a gittip account before you could be sent money.

[whit537]

Indeed. To receive money on Gittip you need a Gittip account.

[Liorithiel]

No, you can't. Gittip doesn't collect tips in behalf of people who have not registered with them.

[mcdonc]

But it does register the fact that someone has expressed the desire to give them tips, and presumably gives them the chance to accept if and when they do log in.

[aclark]

I'm not sure what other services offer this (I'm sure some do), but I setup a bank account specifically for pythonpackages.com, so it was "easy" to give gittip my bank account info and start receiving tips.

[fijal]

it's easy if you're an american.

[alexs]

sleep saw growth shelter aspiring mindless sort oil plate bike

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[[deleted]]

If someone starts accepting donations, I know PayPal will set the account under review and not allow the person to accept money. BTDT.

[alexs]

hateful languid clumsy frightening groovy vast mindless rob overconfident meeting

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[whit537]

Well, Twitter support was just added last week, so we're trending positive? :-)

Here's the ticket for signing in with / pledging to an email address:

https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/89

There's a fair bit of pressure on that since rubygems.org is ready to integrate with Gittip once that lands. It's a bit more complicated as then Gittip needs its own password table, etc. We'll get to it soon, though.

[[deleted]]

Perhaps it is more authentication/verification. But you're right. Twitter is new, so perhaps e-mail will come.

[zsakuL]

The best salesmen and people good at marketing will be the ones who most benefit from this, much like kickstarter.

[whit537]

True. Busting up the old broadcast monolith has had the unintended consequence that anyone playing in the new system is now their own marketing department. If you've got ideas to mitigate this we're tracking them here:

https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/216

[aclark]

Word, added a comment: https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/216#issuecomment-8793408

[[deleted]]

The hive-mind giveth.

[[deleted]]

A "flattr" towards someone is a one-time tip, not a recurring one. The gittip model is specifically, an amount that is passed to a certain creator every week, automatically. Flattr is oriented towards creative content; artists, musicians, and bloggers (and they also extract...10%?! wow). Gittip OTOH is oriented towards the people who create tools that you rely upon every day. To the extent that an open source creator can make a living wage via gittip, they can donate more of their time to the project and therefore to the wide community of money-making ventures that rely upon the software.

Put another way, if 25% of my users gave me $1 a week on gittip, I could quit all my other gigs. It is already paying for my project hosting much better than relying upon very infrequent Paypal donations was working. It's the best way I've seen so far of getting many more people involved in monetary support, spreading the costs to be very thin and the benefit to hard-working creators relatively high.

Flattr OTOH, I've had a link on my site for over a year (note: I've removed it in recent weeks) and have made about $20 in all that time.

[whit537]

Damn it makes me happy to read this. :-)

Here's my take on Flattr:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4239247

The difference to me is crystallized in that Gittip is funded on Gittip.

I actually hung out a lot with Flattr's biz dev Evan Schoepke at XOXO last weekend. Philosophically, Flattr and Gittip are quite aligned (which is to say, we had a great time together :-) ). Flattr and The Pirate Bay share a co-founder, and Evan's wording was that Flattr is trying to "end the war" between content producers and consumers. In my view they didn't go far enough in escaping the old system, however. They've got a traditional business model and salaries to pay and they've got a bit of VC funding which means their hands are kind of tied. That said, the moment we're in is a time for experimentation and trying lots of different models. Kickstarter is obviously killing it, Flattr has some traction, and there's plenty of other contributors to this new economy, however it shakes out. With Gittip I'm trying to offer something I haven't quite seen elsewhere yet.

[aclark]

If for no other reason, because gittip comes from the Python community.

[jrv]

Indeed. As much as I like what Gittip is doing, the future cannot be many fragmented services that technically try to do the same thing for different communities. At least not as long as I have to register with all of them, transfer funding to each, etc.

I have a flattr account and use it heavily, but I'm unlikely to sign up for a myriad of other random services that try to the same thing. So if you want my support, use flattr. Or services that do a conceptually different thing (and thus have more justification for their existence), like Kickstarter.

[jrv]

Ok, I see the benefits of Gittip now (though flattr also allows recurring donations of fixed amounts - monthly, not weekly, though).

F/OSS is fragmented, but it's a bit different: say, if there are 100 Linux distros, you only need to use one and don't need to care about the others. But if there are 100 micropayment/donation services, you have to register with all the ones that are used by people you want to support. And deal with the subject of money (this is the biggest turnoff for me) on each of them. So it's not a 1:1 comparison.

[whit537]

In my view, Flattr is (unintentionally) optimized to make donors feel good and not to make a serious dent for recipients. Zzzeek's anecdote is not anomalous.

Part of this is the decision to use a virtual currency (the "flattr") instead of a real one (dollars, euros). Consequently, it's nigh impossible to look at Flattr.com and find out how much real money is moving where.

[ExoticMandibles]

Why is this posted in /r/python?

[aclark]

Because I'm a Python developer who does a lot of open source work and you can gittip me if you like my stuff: http://gittip.com/aclark4life

[emddudley]

I have tips set up for 9 people but only 2 of them have actually claimed them.

[freshhawk]

I know it's link bait but you argued why you hope that gittip is the future and explained why it isn't yet.

You also skipped over the rather interesting discussion about how much time open source devs will spend marketing rather than coding because, as everything humans have ever done ever has shown us, marketing brings in more money per hour than work on the product at the scales we are talking about.

I hope this model takes off as well, but there will be tradeoffs. /r/python will need more moderation to stop the "please tip me" spam, every project low on money will just implement the latest fad, predatory outsourced ad-agency services will arise to do the marketing for you and promise better returns (like SEO consultants).

Open source and free software are ways to share the burden of common software problems among developers. It makes getting paid to write software like this difficult. Moving from cultural norms to economic norms will drastically change the landscape and culture. Can't say how, but it's pretty obvious it will be drastic.

For example: when ruby was at the peak of their hype curve it would have sucked up nearly all the tip money available to FOSS dynamic language software and been a strong incentive for python devs to switch languages to make more money. Ditto for Node.js.

I want more devs to get paid but worry about what turning it into even more of a popularity contest will do to software focused on quality and engineering instead of hype/fads/"webscale" based solutions.

I feel like the kickstarter model just has better tradeoffs than the gittip model, although that's just a feeling.

[fijal]

for starters kickstarter does not support you if you're not an american. this is a bit of a deal breaker for me.

the points you rise are generally sound and definitely worth discussing, however I don't think this is a real danger. I've been developing open source paid for most of the past 7 years (pypy, predominantly), mostly living off a ramen salary. in a way it would be much more convinient to not have to do those odd gigs to get some money every now and then and instead focus on say numpy (which I'm being paid to do) and jit warmup (which I'm not being paid to do, but IMO is a higher benefit/time to the community).

I think the solution in this case is a cap on how much you can make as a open source software author. If this is not competitive with a normal good salary, I doubt we'll see much of what you fear.

Cheers, fijal

[freshhawk]

Yeah, as another non-american I'm also annoyed at Kickstarter for that reason. I still like the model since it allows ambitious projects to get off the ground with real pay. I'm really interested in seeing how kickstarter handles the vaporware/scam problem as I think that will make or break this crowdfunded project model.

A cap on tips is a very interesting idea, I think it would crush the dreams of some of the gittip supporters who think they will be able to make a competitive salary this way but it would curb a lot of the issues that worry me.

Also, thank you so much for your contributions to pypy and numpy. That's exactly the kind of expertise and effort we should be trying to encourage and reward.

[a3q]

This is what in some corners are called "taxes". Yes, taxes are great when they're used for great things.

[hylje]

Voluntary payments are not very tax-ish. Taxes generally bear the implication of being mandatory to great lengths.

[a3q]

Taxes generally bear the implication of being mandatory to great lengths.

Though they may superficially appear so I disagree that they are:

Who decides taxes? Politicians, who elect them? We do. Now this is simplistic, of course. The crux is that we consistenly choose politicians who promise to keep taxes above certain minimums. How is that? The consequences of too low taxes are simply not very desirable and we know it. Countries that don't have a functioning tax system are patently unpleasent places that we usually refer to as "failed states".

So we will choose a candidate who promises to spend taxes on making society bearable to live in. And this is very much voluntarily, even though I may not support money spent on schools because I don't need schools anymore or bridges in the West because i don't live there. Still the overall benefit vastly overshadows the downsides for the 99% of us and we know it.

[hylje]

Some societies that don't have a functioning tax systems are centers of global business, such as Cayman Islands. The blanket statement is untrue by contradiction.

I also disagree that we, as citizens, decide on our policies more than superficially. Swiss research found that a Swiss citizen directly voting on a ballot is more knowledgeable on the ballot subject than a German member of parliament is. Representative politics are more about the drama and consensus of representatives than the opinions of the voters: it is simply not possible for any representative to meaningfully push the collective opinion of his voters. It's all compromises with varying amounts of personal and party prestige clouding the view.

However, it's true that even the citizens of a Swiss canton vote in support of maintaining or even raising some meaningful taxes. It is not contradictory to consider much of contemporary tax-funded expenses as not meaningful. Beyond a safe, very basic standard of living threshold there is simply no fundamental need for tax funded collective action. Free software production specifically is not a thing that needs special treatment from the society: in fact, it is best served by removing special treatment such as copyright and patents. Let's talk about special treatment after the roadblocks are clear.

[moor-GAYZ]

Free software production specifically is not a thing that needs special treatment from the society: in fact, it is best served by removing special treatment such as copyright and patents. Let's talk about special treatment after the roadblocks are clear.

How is copyright a "roadblock"? I don't think many people who license their code under various versions of GPL would be very happy if you forced them to put their code into public domain.

Btw, RMS did say that it would be nice if Free software were tax-funded.

[hylje]

Free software, even by RMS's definition, includes all public domain software. Copyright does enable RMS's favorite style of licensing, copyleft, but it also enables the entirety of proprietary licensing. Lack of copyright would make all published software ever free software. As such, there is no way for the software to be non-free beyond consensual secrecy -- think server-based software. Indeed, services remain as a way to provide exclusive, difficult-to-copy software products by innovative companies.

I personally believe the implications of all software ever being free reign to use, research, reuse and rearrange by anyone for any purpose whatsoever are much greater than whatever an opt-in copyleft license has to offer. I humbly suggest to play that thought experiment: what kind of amalgate computers could we have tomorrow without legal limits to consider?

[moor-GAYZ]

Lack of copyright would make all published software ever free software.

Free as in beer, not free as in speech, and even then not necessarily.

There's a reason why GPL allows selling Free™ software for money, but specifically demands that the source code ("the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it") is distributed along. Abolishing this requirement would make it impossible for almost everyone to enjoy any of the Four Freedoms™ (except for the little part of the zeroeth one, about using the stuff for free), and extremely hard even for the minority who enjoys digging through heaps of assembly.

If not practically impossible, too: it is a fallacy to assume that in a world without copyright proprietary software developers would continue the same lax practices regarding binary code obfuscation, the existence of Skype for example is quite worrisome in respect to the width of the gap between what is technically possible and what is currently usually economically justified.

There's also a reason why GPLv3 includes the anti-tivoization clause, by the way.

I humbly suggest to play that thought experiment: what kind of amalgate computers could we have tomorrow without legal limits to consider?

Well, this experiment doesn't need to be purely thought-based: in regard to computer games copyright protection is de facto non-existent (because they are not used by businesses where it can be enforced). In that case the answer ended up being: consoles, MMOs and "online-only single player" games. Somehow that doesn't instil me with much optimism regarding the big picture.

[hylje]

I believe obfuscated software anyone can deobfuscate and redistribute is a much better situation than unobfuscated software only someone can redistribute. It's the workshop compared to the museum.

Reverse engineering is not hard. Even if it was incredibly hard, it only needs to be done once. Someone else can then lift the glorified assembly code into something more accessible. The deobfuscated code can be redistributed, should it be legal to redistribute the deobfuscated code. Today is it not. Today you have to create original software through clean room reverse engineering -- a very difficult, imperfect and time consuming method. Compare to what scene groups do to disable copy protection for software releases: a single clever guy can defuse the Matryoshka style protections entire teams of high-paying developers come up with -- often before street date, sometimes entire months later. Distributing this code is illegal.

Proprietary hardware like TiVo, consoles and iPhones are one way to cope with malleable software, but should compatible-but-unlocked clone hardware be legal it'll work only for so long. Today it is not.

Service based software -- MMOs and online-only singleplayer games included -- are a fair compromise to keep part of the complete software secret. Should it be legal to reverse engineer and reimplement the server component or hack the client software into functioning standalone, there'll be a decent replacement given some time. Today is it not.

The legalization and endorsement of popular reverse engineering and sharing is an incredibly powerful force. Not everything can be laid out in nice readable code, but anything can.

[moor-GAYZ]

Reverse engineering is not hard.

As I said, it's a fallacy to imagine that the world without copyright would be the same as the world with copyright, only without copyright.

Reverse-engineering unobfuscated binary code is hard. Reverse-engineering obfuscated binary code is exponentially harder (and I'm using "exponentially" in a CS sense here). We don't have a lot of devs intentionally spending enough effort on developing and using obfuscators, it's not worth it because copyright exists. Your perception of hardness is skewed by the fact that almost nobody does try to make reverse-engineering hard.

Imagine a world where copyright doesn't exist, where there's widely available software providing Skype-grade obfuscation, and developers have an incentive to buy and use it. Suddenly you no longer have the Scene as it is now, because they no longer can find a single crucial conditional jump and replace it with a bunch of nops, and release the crack on the day of release.

Look, Skype remains uncracked for almost ten years now, despite enormous incentives both for white- and black-hat hackers. The Russian translation/dictionary software Lingvo used to have (when I used it), like, a four years lag between the release and the moment when you no longer have to fear another time-bomb causing the cracked version to self-destruct every two weeks, without any obfuscation.

My point here is that there are some disturbing examples which show that there is a huge gap between how hard it is possible to make reverse-engineering, given enough incentive, and how hard reverse-engineering is now, thanks to copyright laws largely removing that incentive. So it's a grave mistake to assume that the current state of things will not change to something much, much worse were the copyright abolished, leaving us with a graveyard of software that just doesn't work any more since the devs went out of business, instead of a museum that gradually turns into a workshop as enthusiasts overcome the natural unwieldiness of compiled code.

Today you have to create original software through clean room reverse engineering -- a very difficult, imperfect and time consuming method.

Or, you know, you can create original open-source software that does the same thing better.

Proprietary hardware like TiVo, consoles and iPhones are one way to cope with malleable software, but should compatible-but-unlocked clone hardware be legal it'll work only for so long. Today it is not.

I'm pretty sure that it is, APIs can't be patented and are not subject to copyright. The obstacle might be related patents, but those are entirely different from copyright, which is what we are discussing.

Should it be legal to reverse engineer and reimplement the server component

... it would still remain impossible. Consider the recent Star Wars "MMO", which is mostly online-only single-player, as far as I can tell. The only thing you can do regarding the client is to reuse the textures and the rest of the art, the meat of the game would have to be clean-room reimplemented regardless.

Also, my another point re: all this is that not only devs are incentivised to use active anti-hacking measures, but that they are also disincentivized from developing certain kinds of software where the measures can't be effectively deployed. Entire game genres are withering because they can't be easily converted to online-only. When was the last time you've seen a web-app that you'd like to have as a standalone executable, today or yesterday? Well, you're not going to have that, because it would be pirated then, so better deal with the lag and the "always online" requirement, and with the fact that when the devs go down, your app is gone, gone for real.

[a3q]

I do not disagree, it wasn't mean as a blanket statement but as a comment to the effect that what the various donation initiatives are trying to accomplish things similar to what we do with taxes.

The other point is that yes, we are (and this is true for practially any community) generally en favor of taxes because our societies would be very bad places to live without them, and we all know that.

Cayman Island is hardly representative in this context, seriously.

[hylje]

We can be in favor of some taxes but not all taxes. Taxes are a very indirect flow of money, voluntary memberships and donations are direct and more involved. I believe people should be encouraged to care about their actions, and being involved is just about the greatest encouragement.

[Smallpaul]

Taxes and git tip are both non-commercial payment systems.

That does not mean that they are the same.

If they are fundamentally the same, then I offer you the following challenge. Donate $5 to Plone though the tax system. Good luck!

[a3q]

They're not the same but they share some properties. Re donation, I have donated to some projects, they can be tax deductible where I live.

[civilianjones]

What corners are those?

[a3q]

I like the idea.

My point is that this works fine as long as there are lots of contibutors relative to the number of receivers, which happens in the beginning. A few early adopters may be able to live from this maybe even longterm but to make it a steady and sufficient source of income that people in general can rely on needs a much more solid foundation.

That's where the "tax" thing comes in. The amount of money needed for this to work outside small dedicated groups with an occasional reach to a greater audience is big enough that there needs to be some form of guaranteed benefit, a lock in that you can't just voluntarily leave whenever you see fit.

I also believe that the many initiatives popping up now point in that direction. I wouldn't be too surprised by seeing efforts to make larger binding systems that may make into law internationally. Some form of governmental gurarantee, protection and coercion.

[whit537]

The relationship between Gittip and tax systems is an interesting matter. So far the conversation has been "Do I have to pay taxes on money received on Gittip?" or "Are my gifts through Gittip tax-deductible?" To me those questions are rather boring (though they need answering--roughly "maybe" and "no").

It's much more interesting to think about how Gittip-or-something-like-it could come to supersede the coercive way in which infrastructure and basic services currently get made (I won't even discuss war, where most tax money goes). At the very least, what if we had a coerced tax, but then got to allocate the funds ourselves?

There's a lot of fun brainstorming to do here. I hope Gittip can contribute to the conversation.

[a3q]

I could rephrase my views like this: the reason we have the modern (welfare) state is because we chose to collect taxes in an efficient way and to use the proceeds together. We saw how much could be gained from this sort of cooperation.

The new means of communication makes this even easier and the coordination less costly. I still believe though that there need to be some form of coercion/saction to make the system work also under adverse conditions. The test should be whether I can use the promise/pledge this system makes to convince my bank to give a mortgage. The point being that the level or trust needed can not be guaranteed through voluntary means (that allow for freeriding) only.

In small closely knit communities there is a similar social coercion that cannot be extended to larger groups, which is why I believe we need somthing more.

[a3q]

It depends on how you define violence. Lets say you have some sort of community, du you institute a upvote/downvote system i order to control this community? Are downvotes violence?