Heroku also sponsored Andrew Godwin's Django Migrations Kickstarter project with a hefty sum. I'm happy to see them constantly giving back to the community.
I wonder how many companies donate to projects as a recruiting strategy, vs. general corporate, or brand, or whatever. Seems like it makes a lot of sense.
Not just recruiting, they are a hosting company, it gets the attention of people who might host with them. Much like you can follow tons of people on Twitter to trigger new follower messages to many, who may check out who you are.
Nope. It was a very early design decision that gifts on Gittip are anonymous in the particulars. The idea was to remove the "why did you unfriend me?" awkwardness that only gets compounded if money is involved. We want gifts on Gittip to be no-strings-attached for both sides.
With companies coming on board, we may have to rethink this a bit. Fortunately there are some features in the pipeline that I think will address this. If you want to dive in:
Well, mostly I want to take this opportunity to double-check our assumptions. Does this threaten the autonomy of the communities and individuals that Heroku is giving to? This doesn't give Heroku some undue influence, does it? Does this create a fairness problem or a secrecy problem?
On the other side of the coin, I want to provide value to Heroku so they and others like them are incentivized to give further. See further comments below.
Here's what's bugging me about this: potential conflicts of interest.
Kenneth Reitz is almost certainly behind this (he's the "Python Overlord" at Heroku, as well as the author of the Requests HTTP library for Python). Kenneth is a friend of mine from before I launched Gittip. I'll be hosting him in a couple weeks when he comes to Pittsburgh to speak at our local Python user group. Kenneth has been a big supporter of Gittip and has in fact been one of the top receivers since Gittip launched. I (openly) accepted a $300 hosting voucher for Gittip from Kenneth during Waza earlier this year.
Interestingly, though, I had no advance notice that they were going to do this. I've been planting the seed of this idea with Kenneth and his colleagues, and I'm excited and grateful to Kenneth and to Heroku that they've decided to follow through. It's obviously a huge validation of Gittip to have Heroku step forward like this. However, I learned about this when I loaded the Gittip homepage last night and saw Heroku listed under "New Participants" and clicked through and saw how much they were giving. My reaction on Twitter was genuine:
All that said, let's pause for a moment to feel a slight feeling of paranoia here at the outset of what I hope will be an explosion of corporate patronage of open source through Gittip and consequent progress in open source. Let's make sure we do this right.
- Does this create any conflicts of interest?
- What if Heroku were giving to kennethreitz or other Heroku employees? They're not (I checked under the hood), but what if?
That sounds pretty cool. I'd be worried about there getting to be a decent amount of money on the line (I could see thousands each week for something like Rails or Python long term) and people trying to game the allocation to get an extra few percentage points of the increasingly large pie.
Why do you assume Heroku wants you to know who they're tipping? Or that it's a positive thing for us to know? Perhaps they are just trying to help the community and don't need credit for it, other than the indication that they are giving.
