Chad Whitacre

362 points

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.

Open Minded Author Contributor Club

Authored Content

When the hacker ethic meets old ideas about brand

The hacker ethic says we should value solving problems more than preserving institutions. But what happens to organizational identity when we do that?

How to make branding decisions in an open community

Docker's recent rebranding efforts offer a lesson in public decision-making.

The benefits of tracking issues publicly

In open organizations, tracking to-do items online can turn customers into colleagues.

A person holding on to clouds that look like balloons

Addressing open source's free rider problem

To make open organizations sustainable, we'll need to solve the free rider problem. Here's one place to start.

Gratipay makes 'love' their most important core value

Openness is not an end in itself. Ellen Marie Dash firmly established this point back in 2014, writing: While I like the ideals and goals of Open Companies, I find that the…

3 lessons from Gratipay's take-what-you-want compensation experiment

This is the second in a two-part series on hiring and compensation practices in open organizations. In Want the best employees? Let them hire themselves, I introduced the…

Authored Comments

whit537

8 Aug 2017

When the hacker ethic meets old ideas about brand

Thanks, Shane! See you over there! :-)

whit537

8 Aug 2017

When the hacker ethic meets old ideas about brand

This is an interesting topic and worthy of consideration (in Gratipay we're thinking about this in https://github.com/gratipay/inside.gratipay.com/issues/692; I've taken the liberty of cc'ing you there).

Now, the point of trademark law as I understand it is consumer protection. But enforcing trademark law is expensive and difficult, requiring constant vigilance, and neglecting to act to protect a trademark means giving it up (yes?).

But why is trademark law still relevant in the age of Twitter, when consumers can be informed of brand confusions swiftly and directly? Aren't social media and email cheaper and faster ways of protecting consumers than legal actions?