Gratipay and Liberapay are open source tipping systems for developers and creators who contribute to the commons. They have had their fair share of trouble. In the beginning, Gratipay was called Gittip, and Liberapay is a very recent fork. Legal concerns are being ironed out, and funding is now for groups rather than individuals …
Gratipay 2.0
Payments and Payroll for Open Work
Last month, we warned that “it will be hard” for us to survive the demise of our vendor and close partner, Balanced Payments. Then we discovered that it “couldn’t be harder”: we went out of business, due to legal concerns that came to light while migrating away from Balanced. Today, we’re pleased to announce that we have relaunched under new terms of service.
Legal concerns put an end to our old model. Business vision is driving our new model. The purpose of this post is to explain to you, our users, whatchanges we’ve made, and how you can get back on track as a receiver on Gratipay 2.0.
( Excerpted from this article on medium.com )
Liberapay is a recent fork of Gratipay by French developers, adapting the system to the European legal environment…
What is Liberapay?
Liberapay is a way to donate money recurrently to people whose work you appreciate.
Payments come with no strings attached. You don’t know exactly who is giving to you, and donations are capped at €100.00 per week per donor to dampen undue influence.
Donations are public. By default, the total amount you give and the total amount you receive are public (you can opt out of sharing this info).
Liberapay does not take a cut of payments, the service is funded by the donations to its own account. So, recipients get the full value of the donations, but there are payment processing fees when moving money in or out of Liberapay.
Liberapay is an open project, you can help us translate it, improve its code, and manage its legal entity. If you do so you’ll be able to join the Liberapay team and receive a share of the money that our users donate to keep the service running.
Liberapay to their potential users:
“Are you a creator of commons? Do you make free art, spread free knowledge, write free software?”
( From the liberapay.com site )
According to what Simon Sarazin posted in a discussion on the P2P Facebook group, those two are the only currently existing open source alternatives to proprietary tipping systems such as patreon / tippee / flattr.
Although they are struggling, their principal objective, to support creators and the commons, merits our consideration. They are the pioneers of a future where the commons matters and where being open source and struggling may be a recommendation, rather than a red flag …