requests

[gratipay-bot]

https://gratipay.com/requests/

(This application will remain open for at least a week.)

[chadwhitacre]

I'm talking on the phone right now with @kennethreitz about the possibility of using twyw! 😮

[chadwhitacre]

On my radar for tomorrow: recall and list what the steps would be to set up requests for twyw. Pumpkin time tonight. :-)

!m *

[chadwhitacre]

The biggest thing is that it needs to be a contractor relationship between the members of the project and the project owner. Are you prepared to take that on yourself, @kennethreitz? Or would we need to talk about having a "fiscal sponsor" ("umbrella organization") fill that role? Basically if you pay any one person more than $600 in a year then you would need to send them a 1099 at tax time. That's assuming that they're in the US. If they're outside the US then it depends on the tax treaties between the US (or wherever your project owner legal entity is domiciled) and where the contractor is located. Obviously a bit of a mess—really looking forward to abstracting it away, but you're Patient 1, so ... ;-)

[chadwhitacre]

What I would luuuuuuuuuv to see is PSF act in the fiscal sponsor role here, assume the bureaucratic burden, and accept a pwyw fee from Requests for their trouble.

[kennethreitz]

I am willing to accept that, assuming we move forward.

[chadwhitacre]

@kennethreitz Okay, cool! That makes this easier. :-)

So the steps are:

1. Add a national identity.
2. Ping me here so I can mark it as verified.
3. Tell me the dollar amount to set as the weekly "available" for members to take from the requests project on Gratipay (see below).
4. For each member:
   1. Have them add and verify an email and set it as their PayPal.
   2. Have them add a national identity.
   3. Ping me here so I can mark their identity as verified.
   4. Add them as a member (this will redirect until [3] above is done).

In terms of what to set for (3), it probably doesn't matter too much until we start to see where the project income is going to initially stabilize. I will double-check, but I'm pretty sure if you set it at $100 (let's say) and you only have $10 in income for the week, then ... what do we do, I wonder? I will have to check on that ... 😊

[kennethreitz]

ping!

[kennethreitz]

/cc @Lukasa @sigmavirus42

[chadwhitacre]

Verified! 💃

[chadwhitacre]

And /cc @sigmavirus24 ;-)

[chadwhitacre]

I will double-check, but I'm pretty sure if you set it at $100 (let's say) and you only have $10 in income for the week, then ... what do we do, I wonder?

Looks like we clip to the project's balance if it's less than the explicitly set available amount.

[chadwhitacre]

Tell me the dollar amount to set as the weekly "available" for members to take from the requests project on Gratipay (see below).

Okay! So here's the basic idea:

• Projects have one owner, and 0+ members.
• Every week:
  1. People pay money for the project.
  2. An explicitly set available amount is distributed to members according to their own take-what-you-want (twyw) setting.
  3. Anything left over goes to the project owner.

Here's an example with made-up amounts:

1. $1000 comes in for Requests.
2. $700 is available for twyw.
3. @Lukasa takes $300.
4. @sigmavirus24 takes $350.
5. @kennethreitz gets $350:
   • the $50 that @Lukasa and @sigmavirus24 left on the table, plus
   • the $300 that @kennethreitz never put on the table in the first place.

Note that payouts go from smallest to largest, so in the above example if only $600 came in then @Lukasa would get his $300, @sigmavirus24 would only get $300, and @kennethreitz would get $0.

The way we think of it in Gratipay is that available is our budget for labor (salaries, wages, contractors) and non-available is our budget for operating and capital costs (hosting, etc.).

So I see two basic options for you, @kennethreitz.

1. Owner First—You could let Requests run for a while without setting available or adding members, to get a sense of where income is going to stabilize. At that point, set available and add members.

2. Members First—You could set a high available ($1000?) and add members right away.

   1. Owner ∈ Member—The project owner can also explicitly be listed as a member, so as a variant you could set a high available and also add yourself as a member alongside the other two.

Those are the building blocks we've got for you, and some of the ways you could piece them together. Does that give you enough to go on to decide where to set available and who to add as members to start with?

[mattbk]

Approved! Leaving this open while you figure out TWYW.

[Lukasa]

So, uh, here's the thing.

Right now I work full-time on Python HTTP projects for HPE. Requests is very explicitly part of that remit. That means I draw down a healthy paycheck for my work on Requests already. I think adding an additional source of income for the same work represents at best an unethical conflict of interest, and at worst may explicitly violate terms in my contract.

For this reason, I think I cannot accept any money raised via Gratipay for Requests at this time.

For other incidental reasons I think that this choice is likely to remain in place even if my employment situation were to change. I have some concerns about accepting funding from developers instead of companies, but those concerns are not best discussed or elaborated on in GitHub issues: not the form for it. 😉

[chadwhitacre]

@Lukasa If you accept money via Gratipay then you'd be doing so as an independent contractor hired by Kenneth, so you'd have two employers. Certainly you shouldn't bill two people for the same hour of work! I guess you'd have to keep track of which hours were for HPE and which were for Kenneth ... but if you're comfortably employed at HPE then you don't have much incentive to bother with that, do you? ;-)

And that's okay! The point of Gratipay twyw is to be as flexible and fluid as open source itself. For example, three of Gratipay's most active contributors right now don't show up on our own money distribution for one reason or another. The important thing is the community. If you don't need the money, @Lukasa, then it's totally appropriate to pass on it, and to let someone else in the Requests community take it who perhaps will appreciate it more.

As far as companies giving instead of devs shuffling money around, I don't see why GitHub issues aren't an appropriate form for discussing that: gratipay/gratipay.com#4135. ;-)

[Lukasa]

If you don't need the money, @Lukasa, then it's totally appropriate to pass on it, and to let someone else in the Requests community take it who perhaps will appreciate it more.

In my view it's just as important to not even be seen to be able to take the money. It is tricky enough having corporate interests in OSS, and a lot of people don't like it. They will like it even less if it looks like I'm out for nothing more than to line my own pockets by using the hard earned cash of other devs. So for my part, leaving their money on the table is intended to send a clear message of intent: I think it's the job of big corporations to support the software they build their empires on, not for developers to support big corporations through subsidising the labour of others.

As for gratipay/gratipay.com#4135, seems like you have a plan for moving that idea forward, so that seems fab. I just don't want to get involved in a back-and-forth on the value of the idea on GitHub issues: they're not well suited as a discussion forum, more as a Q&A tool.

[kennethreitz]

We may not follow through on this ;)

[chadwhitacre]

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yinz follow yer ❤️. :-)

@kennethreitz Do you need us to withdraw the Requests project from Gratipay?

[kennethreitz]

I think so!

[chadwhitacre]

Okay, I've moved it to the "rejected" state:

https://gratipay.com/requests/

Let us know if anything changes, we'd be happy to have you either to receive funds from companies and others, distribute funds to contributors, or both! :-)

[mattbk]

As this may come up again in the future, here is another example of what @Lukasa is describing: npgall/cqengine#76 (comment):

So I guess I do get paid to work on CQEngine indirectly already, and Synchronoss sfaff make contributions as well which is nice.
I think if I accepted payment for CQEngine outside of my current employer though, it may create a conflict of interest against my employment contract. So this is something I might revisit in a few years!
In the meantime please enjoy CQEngine free of charge!

[chadwhitacre]

We added project closing, so I went ahead and moved this from rejected back to under review and closed it instead since that's more accurate. Should now be 410: https://gratipay.com/requests/.