Rich Hickey stops Clojure funding appeal from 2011 onwards
clojure.org
clojure.org
Typically when someone is as driven as this and you get the output of all the labour that went in to it the proper words are 'thank you' and if you feel like rewarding the creator then that's great. But that does not entitle anybody to future preferential treatment or even any guaranteed output level.
Personally, I'd have no problem blowing people off who ask for more than they were promised if it got to this point. Then again, that might bring negativity to the community, so I can see how the decision to just stop personal donations makes sense.
Randy Milholland, the webcomic artist behind Something Positive, quit his job and funded himself for a year with donations to spend more time on his comics. When his output was still less-than-daily, he got a flood of complaints. "We gave you money and you're still not updating as often as you promised!" When he offered to refund the donations of anyone unsatisfied, not a single donor took him up on it. Apparently most (or all) of the complainers hadn't donated, but still felt entitled to greater output.
This is not to say that Rich is making a mistake by no longer accepting donations. Even if most complaints are from non-donors, their (unfounded) sense of entitlement comes from the fact that donations are happening. Still, I hate to think that people happy to donate can no longer do so because of the negative effects caused by non-contributing complainers.
My empirical evidence comes from the Cyanogenmod Android project - where "when can I haz gingerbread" or "this sucks - why arent you spending enough time fixing <bug>" is always from non donors.
NOTE: it is easy to see this trend on the CM forums, because your forum handle displays whether you are a donor or not. That I think is an easy way to lower the credibility of flamers (something that isnt possible on Clojure Google Groups). But then again, maybe that in itself give rises to the expectation that "if I donate, I can flame". I havent seen it happen on the CM forums though.
Given Clojure/core potential earnings and the bigger bang for the buck of corporate sponsorships, requests for individual donations are not worth the ill-will that they apparently cause. I like his techniques for time management and choosing his battles carefully.
Onward with Clojure development!
I asked him and he said "no relation".
I never make large donations to open source projects, etc., but I give small $2 to $10 donations for things that I use. What this allows me to do is to contribute a modest $30 to $40 per year to projects that I use and not feel like a total freeloader.
But, he had changed the paypal link on clojure.org/funding to go to clojure/core instead of himself. This was reflection of the changes to the clojure team, which seemed fair IMHO. I'm sad to see that pointing the donate link at clojure/core had unintended consequence of creating some sense of entitlement on the core group.
He's basically complaining that people think they own him (or his time) because they donated money. I've seen that, and it's terribly unfortunate. I was right with him until I saw
"I encourage businesses using Clojure ...to discuss options for corporate support for Clojure."
When you get a support contract from Red Hat (for example), you aren't donating money to the development of Linux like a sponsorship; you're indirectly supporting Linux development, but really what you're interested in is either (a) specific solutions to specific problems, or (b) getting access to people should a problem arise in the future during the term of the contract.
they'll have influence over you, wouldn't they?
All I was originally saying was that I just feel he'll end up in the same situation. I'm not suggesting he can't say no. :)
2) I have run into people that will say that. It is usually a bluff.
3) In the rare cases it is not a bluff, you can either drop the business (figuring you don't want to deal with person X) or, if you think they are out-of-line take it to their superiors.
All that being said, if you aren't willing to call the bluff for whatever reason, then they do exert an influence over you. That's really your fault though. If you have backed yourself into a corner where a single contract will make-or-break you and you aren't on really good terms with the people involved you are screwed no matter what.
If you're pointing out that people are acting irrationally, then, yes, they are. The difference is that we tend to treat "business transactions" different from other kinds - I think monetary donations are not seen as business transaction, so the expectations are different. See this excerpt from Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=8923395...
An example of this was my department wanted a certain feature in the Moose library, so we offered to pay one of the developers to write it. Then it turned out we didn't actually have funding for this ("pay someone to work on free software? fuck that") and so it never happened. But for a company with it's act together, this is a great way to make your internal codebase cleaner, and you get to say, "thanks to us, everyone gets this".
If this is his business model, it's a good one.
He likely would let them pay for:
* advice on how to work around the lack of their proposed language feature (as a subset of "advice on how to solve problems in or with the language").
* some influence over prioritisation of the roadmap. If there are two language features Rich was planning to add anyway, pushing one that a paying customer desperately needs up the priority list wouldn't interfere much with the creative direction of the language.
As I see it with this service they pay him for his consulting and knowledge on how to use at best Clojure for development/testing/deploy.
But they don't have the option to say something regarding the development of the language itself.
Individuals think a $100 contribution gives them some reason to bring up issues. Corporations think something similar for a $100k contribution.
and what a gift it is! Thank you Rich (and the rest of the Clojure community) for this wonderful language.
Personally, it makes my work more enjoyable when I use it and I look around and see folks all over having fun with it. Plus it's creating jobs and competitive advantage.
Not everything is awesome, but from where I sit, Clojure sure is.
Well, not really. My biggest beef with clojure is that it masquerades as an open source project by strictly following the letter (it is released under an open source license), but not actually following the spirit in any meaningful way.
How many other OSS projects have an exhaustive list on their website of everyone who is allowed to make contributions?
That is a way of thanking contributors.
If the question is, "How many other OSS projects require filing a CA before patches will be accepted?", then the answer is "many". viz. Many run by Oracle now (e.g. http://openjdk.java.net/contribute/), all apache projects AFAIK (http://www.apache.org/licenses/icla.txt), django (http://www.djangoproject.com/foundation/cla/faq/), etc. etc.
So...what "spirit" are you talking about here?
In case you hadn't noticed, Oracle is widely considered to be an enemy of open source, so pointing out similarities with their processes isn't hugely helpful. In fact, contributor agreements are reviled by a large segment of the open source community (see the fights that go on whenever this subject comes up on LWN, one of the less flame-infested pro-OSS sites). This example is a particularly bad CA because it is effectively a full grant. The only way it could be worse would be a total transfer of copyright.
Finally, unlike any other projects I'm aware of, Clojure requires the agreement to be printed out, signed, then snail mailed to a foreign country. There is no reason for this other than to deter potential contributors. I've accepted one CA in the past - after fixing a crash in a little-exercised part of Ogre3D I figured the change was so minor that they could own the copyright on it as far as I was concerned. Would I have submitted the fix if I had to post a letter to New York? Not bloody likely.
Other projects (Android is a notable example) are widely derided for this sort of approach to open source - why does Clojure get a free pass?
The OpenJDK CA process was put in place a long time ago by Sun, generally well-liked in open source circles last I knew. And I guess you've got the same problems with all of Apache, for example (which, BTW, requires a signed copy of their CA to be faxed, at a minimum -- and I suppose some would complain about the faxing). Rough spot, there.
IANAL, neither are you, and we weren't in the room when Rich talked to his. Even if those things weren't true, I'm pretty sure Rich (nor anyone else) would accede to derision by instead of nonspecific, unconstructive griping.
Sun was never well liked outside of the Jave gated community. They - and their CA process - were used several times as examples in articles and presentations on 'how not to do open source' (eg. http://lwn.net/Articles/370157/ - 'How to destroy your community').
>And I guess you've got the same problems with all of Apache, for example (which, BTW, requires a signed copy of their CA to be faxed, at a minimum -- and I suppose some would complain about the faxing).
No, they accept e-mailing. See http://www.apache.org/licenses/icla.txt. I am indeed opposed to their CA requirement, but in this case it appears to be simply misguided rather than an attempt at creating a barrier.
>IANAL, neither are you, and we weren't in the room when Rich talked to his. Even if those things weren't true, I'm pretty sure Rich (nor anyone else) would accede to derision by instead of nonspecific, unconstructive griping.
I object very strongly to your dismissal of my position as 'nonspecific, unconstructive griping'. I'll try to restate it as plainly as possible:
No other example has been found of a project with this requirement. Given that there are a large number of both companies and non-profit organisations requiring CAs, none of which require a postal copy, it cannot be rationally argued that this is a legal requirement unless you are also willing to argue that all of those other companies are failing to show due diligence; I don't believe that argument would have any merit. Since Clojure has that requirement, the most plausible reason is that it is an attempt to erect as large a barrier as possible to participation (and the only other reason I can think up is that Rich Hickey is a paranoid of the tinfoil hat variety, but I've seen no other evidence of that). I cannot overstate enough how large a barrier this is; even those corporate OSS projects widely condemned for their failure at understanding the open source ideal (I've already mentioned Android; another example might be OpenOffice, most of whose developers recently decided enough was enough and jumped ship) don't make it this hard. The deliberate attempt to discourage community involvement is what I believe runs counter to the spirit of open source.
it is an attempt to erect as large
a barrier as possible to participation
And, if you work for a company, they, too require a snail mail copyright release.
Edit: now that I've had my morning cup of tea, I've properly read that link - SQLite doesn't even require any form of contributor agreement, so all you're pointing out is that they require a company to agree that work done on their time is free to be contributed by the employee. That isn't the same thing at all.
I will point out in return that their requirements have indeed caused a number of forks (some of which ended up being merged back in without copyright assignment TTBOMK) and acrimonious arguments despite giving strong legal assurances to the contributor that the FSF will only use the assignment for a few limited purposes.
The fact that it requires physical transfer of document stands though, so I'm satisfied that you have actually read what I wrote rather than dismissing it out of hand, and will hence shut up on the topic :P.
There are a bunch of corporate sponsors of Clojure, and the list continues to grow: http://clojure.org/funders
FWIW, Snowtide was the first announced corporate sponsor of Clojure in the 2010 drive, and we'll be renewing that sponsorship for 2011 (I just need to dig myself out of the stuff that accumulated over the past 2 weeks first!).
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Scanning the comments also gives me some additional background on topics I may not be familiar with.