Gratipay

» see gratipay.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Gittip opened on 1 June 2012. You picked somebody whose work you used and set a weekly amount, and every Thursday the money moved without either of you having to say anything about it. There were no campaigns and no reward tiers. The person receiving saw a number going up and never saw the names behind it, which was the whole design: the point was to remove the transaction from the relationship entirely.

Chad Whitacre built it in Pittsburgh and ran it as what he called an open company. The code sat on GitHub and the company's own finances were published as they went, so anyone could look at what it had and what it was spending. In February 2014 that principle met a harassment complaint the founder wanted handled in the open like everything else. Several of the platform's best-known recipients left over how it went, and the name came out of it damaged. The rename to Gratipay was announced that July and took effect on 26 August 2014.

The money layer underneath was never as solid as the idea. Balanced Payments, the processor Gittip had been built on, went out of business in 2015, and when Gratipay went to Stripe the answer came back that the model looked like money transmission. A business that takes money from one person and passes it to a second one needs a license for it, state by state, and those licenses are expensive. Gratipay hired a lawyer, who agreed with Stripe. In May 2015, after 152 consecutive weekly paydays, there was no payday.

The mechanism that decided this product's life was American state financial licensing, which is about as far from a desk in Ankara as a subject gets. The end of it I do recognize is the other one. The open source that my generation of engineers actually ran on was maintained by people doing it after hours, and in 2012 nobody around me was asking out loud who ought to be paying them.

~ the dossier ~

~ the open company ~

The Gittip blog ran a post in the summer of 2012 titled "The First Open Company." It meant it literally. Roadmap decisions happened in GitHub issues where anyone could file against the company itself the way they would file against a bug, and the revenue numbers went out in public as they arrived.

It was also the thing that broke. An open company has no private room to take a complaint into.

~ 152 weeks ~

The skipped payday got a name almost immediately: Gratipocalypse. What came back afterward was built to sit on the other side of the legal line, with money flowing to teams and projects as payment for work rather than to named individuals as gifts, because a company paying for work is a customer relationship and not a transfer.

On 1 November 2017 at 21:21 UTC the Gratipay account posted that after five and a half years it was shutting down at the end of the year. The reason Whitacre gave was not the legal one this time. Funding open source, he wrote, is almost entirely a marketing problem, and they had spent the year writing code instead. The site went static on 29 December 2017.

~ what liberapay kept ~

The code did not die with the company. In 2015, while Gratipay was still working out what it was allowed to do with American money, the codebase was forked into Liberapay and run from France under a nonprofit, where collecting donations and passing them on does not mean fifty separate licenses. Liberapay is still running today.

Gratipay's own total was $1.1 million, from dozens of companies to hundreds of open source projects. The page at gratipay.com has been sitting there ever since, a banner reading "A pioneer in open source sustainability, 2012 to 2017, RIP" above four square links, one of which points at the fork. Nine years later all four still resolve.

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