On May 11, 2012, I had the idea of a “tipjar for GitHub,” and I bought the domain name gittip.com. Even before Gittip launched three weeks later, I knew that the scope of the idea was much bigger than just the open-source software community. In fact, I almost used logstown.com. My brother-in-law talked me out of that, but six weeks after launching Gittip, I opened a ticket about rebranding. That ticket devolved into an exemplary bikeshed, and the name has stayed Gittip for the subsequent two years.

Why Change?

Gittip was a serviceable name, but it wasn’t ideal. For most people, Gittip didn’t have any relevant associations; it didn’t suggest anything about our mission, which is to enable an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love. Gittip was hard to spell, hard to pronounce, and hard to remember. For people who did know what Git and GitHub are, the situation was worse, because Gittip put us in a box we didn’t want to be in. We’re building a mass-market product, not something just for a tech niche. And for pete’s sake, my own kids confused Gittip with GitHub. Here’s a blimp my six-year-old drew for me:

How had he even ever heard of GitHub?

I suppose that’s evidence for why the Git Trademark Policy in fact prohibits unauthorized usage of the name Git in names such as Gittip:

In addition, you may not use any of the Marks as a syllable in a new word or as part of a portmanteau (e.g., “Gitalicious”, “Gitpedia”) used as a mark for a third-party product or service without Conservancy’s written permission.

GitHub and others have agreements with Software Freedom Conservancy (the nonprofit responsible for the Git trademark). Maybe Gittip could’ve reached an agreement as well, though that seems unlikely, since we don’t have any direct relation to Git.

Why Now?

While it is true that Conservancy is enforcing the Git trademark, and we were likely to hear from them before long, avoiding that is a secondary reason for our timing. The main reason is to take advantage of a lull in our growth. After a strong growth run that showed the fundamental soundness of our idea, we stalled out due to tensions with a few key users.

Changing our name is a momentum-buster in its own right. Since our momentum is already busted, we may as well take advantage of the opportunity and get the name change out of the way.

Some will characterize our name change as merely “an effort to avoid bad publicity,” because, “[p]art of being an ‘open company’ is to engage in all the same PR shenanigans that normal companies do, just in public.” We believe that “in public” is one hell of a qualifier. You can go read for yourself all of our internal discussions about the timing of this name change relative to the tensions of a few months ago. Because we are an open company, you can reach your own conclusion.

Why Gratipay?

Gratipay, a combination of gratitude and pay, strongly suggests themes directly related to our mission, to build an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love. A secondary association (primary for Europeans) is gratis (“free”) + pay: pay for things you could otherwise take free—“Free? Pay!” Gratipay is easy to spell and pronounce, once you get the association with gratitude. Gratipay is somewhat similar to Gittip (the Levenshtein distance is four), and actually the word tip is still tucked away in there: our roots are not lost. Gratipay also works with our heart coin logo.