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?
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.