True, Sentry is a good example of a successful open source business model. GitHub itself is probably the best example of a company that's #winning at open source. They don't give their source away, but they give their service away. But it's pretty well-established that there are business models that can subsidize open source, isn't it?
The interesting thing about Gittip is that there's no strings attached for receivers. We've already got a company advertising itself on the Gittip givers leaderboard (https://workforpie.com/). But there's a decoupling of corporate interests from personal interests on Gittip that I think is worth continuing to explore. Even if Gittip were filled with corporate donors, their contributions would still be anonymous to the receivers. There's no strings attached. To me, that's new and interesting.
> They don't give their source away, but they give their service away.
github is not open source - they have a closed source service that is available for free, with limitations. Unless you meant that they are building a business based on an open source piece of software, which is a little different from e.g. Sentry.
They don't just use an open source piece of software (RoR), they use the open source community to build street cred that they then cash in to score their real customers.
Don't get me wrong: I love GitHub. It's a fantastic product and an inspiration to me. Instead of paying $7/mo for private repos, I choose to give back by gittiping members of the organization:
