Chad Whitacre

362 points
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I'm the founder of Gratipay, an open organization with a mission to cultivate an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love. We help companies and others pay for open source—and we're funded on our own platform. Offline, I live outside Pittsburgh, PA, USA, and online, I live on Slack, IRC, and GitHub.

Authored Comments

When I reach this point I get fuzzy and dial back out: the point in the future at which more money is circling in the opposite direction (push instead of pull) and ... we wake up one day and realize we don't need money anymore? Do we reach that point? How does the transition work? What the h*ck does that look like? I haven't gazed that deeply yet.

I think whatever you do to be able to fill your days with gratitude and generosity and fun working together is awesome!

What I'm smashing my face against (one of the things) out here in San Francisco at the moment (I'm visiting from Pittsburgh), is less of an individual mindset, and more of a *corporate* mindset that one doesn't pay for things unless one has to in order to get some value. It's *really easy* for firms to pay for value ex ante, and *really hard* for them to pay for value ex post facto. In the case of free software, corporations harvest a lot of value. How do we evolve our corporations to pay for this value ex post facto? Is it sufficient to say that free software developers benefit non-monetarily from the goods that the corporations themselves produce? Does that bear out in practice?