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Comment by Lazare | Hacker News Reader

I don't think this is about the amount. Allegedly, Reitz:

  1) Knew about a feature a volunteer was working on
  2) Started a fundraiser for the feature
  3) Kept all the money

Maybe $30k is peanute, but I'd have grave concerns if I saw a colleague stealing coins out of a tip jar at the local coffee shop, and the fact it's only a few quarters would honestly make it worse, if anything.

Of course, like you, I have no idea if the underlying accusations are true or not, although I will note that all those archive.org links are going to be hard to explain away. But I don't think "it was only $30k!" is a valid defence here.

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"Knew about a feature a volunteer was working on"

That's not quite right. He knew about a feature being added to a separate dependent library. Further work would be needed to leverage it. The author wasn't promised any money.

> That's not quite right. He knew about a feature being added to a separate dependent library. Further work would be needed to leverage it.

Ah, but was this made clear in the crowdfunding proposal?

It's here: https://web.archive.org/web/20180701201816/https://www.kenne...

It is not specific as to how he planned to support async.

The tone of the article was very much about the 5k being a ridiculous expense. I find that very odd.

If you're a volunteer and expect to be paid make it clear before hand. If you've written open source code and someone takes it without paying for it ... that's the whole point of open source. If someone tells you to work for them without compensation tell them to take a hike.

At any rate, drama like this is why I don't work on open source any more. Too many people with too much time and too many issues.

> The tone of the article was very much about the 5k being a ridiculous expense.

I did not detect that tone at all. Rather, I interpreted it as surprise that Reitz spent $5k of a fundraiser very explicitly earmarked as being "to support Request 3.0 development" on a computer, when a new computer is not obviously something you need to develop Requests 3.0.

I also didn't get the feeling that the author expected to be paid (in fact, he seems quite clear that he did not).

Would paying him to work on it not be part of supporting Request 3.0 development? Unless he specifically said it was only going to operating costs or other people, I'd assume that at least a good part of a donation toward him would be for a salary for himself.

Sure, but the problem there (as the linked article discusses) is that he didn't say that's what he was doing.

$30k isn't a huge sum, but you still need some transparency and accounting. A line item saying "it all went to me, to reimburse me for all the work I'm doing on the project" is fine, but you still need the line item so people can evaluate it.

Unless he had said otherwise, I'd think "it all went to me" is the default for the entirety of funds sent to him on a donation page on his own site with his name on it. Maybe he could have been more explicit that it was a salary for him to spend time on Requests, not some team, but that doesn't seem like something to demonize him over.

The article does raise some good concerns of whether he claimed on the donation page to work on things he wasn't personally going to do. I just think a few of the article's angles are pretty flawed and uncharitable.

This is why I do not work on open source projects any more. Entitled know nothings who demand that everyone live on $5 a day in a dilapidated share house because they do.

I've had people stalk me, much like this post, and demand I give a line item breakdown of where the expenses are going.

This is a huge problem for the ecosystem since we are being left with the no-hopers who are unemployable for a reason. And the corporate funded developers who have a huge conflict of interest.

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