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I think you're forgetting that Rails was created for free, in my spare time, while I was being paid $30/hour working for 37signals and other US clients on a variety of projects.

But that's even besides the point. Companies letting their employees use company time contributing to OSS has been great. As the first sentence of the article points to, I'm talking about projects raising money directly from the community.

My point is that this is, in and of itself, fundraising.

Edit

Also, I don't want to minimize the effort it took for you to create Rails, build momentum behind it, and get other people excited about it. What if Kickstarter, et al is just a new medium to help empower other people to do what you did?

Nobody would have contributed to an unproven web framework written in a then-obscure language.

Two recent OS fundraising successes I can think of are funding for further development of Typed Clojure, and the integration/rewrite of South into Django core. Both projects were in production use when they raised the money!

Imagine today, someone pitching to build a new async web framework in Livescript. "Why not Ember/Meteor/Angular!?" "Why not Javascript?!". It could be that someone comes up with a truly killer framework by utilizing Livescript's features the way DHH did with Ruby and Rails, and if they did I'd happily use it, but I wouldn't put my money on it today.

Based on his comment, my imoression is that David wrote Rails because he neeeed Rails for the job, not because a client needed Rails written for them. There's a difference between those two things.

There are a lot of things that people are willing to do for free, but they wouldn't be willing to do it for a dollar - say, helping someone change his car tire.

There is a psychological difference - if you transfer the mindset from 'helping out' to 'work for hire', then suddenly you have to pay "enough" (which will be a huge amount for many projects) or you'll get less stuff done than you'd get for free.

"First of all, it's tempting to cash in on goodwill earned."

The way I see it what you have done is way better.

And this strategy is really what people should be doing as opposed to simply cashing in goodwill:

"Take Ruby on Rails. More than 3,000 people have committed man-decades, maybe even man-centuries, of work for free. Buying all that effort at market rates would have been hundreds of millions of dollars. Who would have been able to afford funding that?"

Work for free that has benefited many people including you. Can't put a price on that.

You created Ruby on Rails and it was like well enough that all those people "more than 3000 ... man-decades ..." have put their time into the project and you have benefited greatly because you are the person that most people associate with Rails. Not any of the 3000 contributors. And that notoriety is what pays off in droves. Even if you passed up a few dollars (debatable by your argument?) you've gotten something way more valuable.

I don't think dhh would argue that he has made a nice bank roll on Rails - no one would. But he isn't the only one that's benefited. There are quite a few of the 3000 committers that have their own consulting companies and they do quite well. Many speak at conferences, write books, etc. This is all pretty standard in the OS community and nothing new to Rails or dhh.

I think what he's taking aim at more is that he did this for free of charge and did not require any fundraising campaign to get it off the ground (or continue it). And it's the other freedom (in his case, libre) that allowed him to do whatever he wanted, on whatever whim he wanted. There was no hard deadline (except those he made) imposed because of funding constraints. And from that perspective, he's absolutely right: not beholden to anyone else's money or rules is the ultimate freedom to be as creative as you want to make whatever you want.

Because it's possible now to get a project funded on something like Kickstarter, there's less freedom when that happens because money becomes the ultimate driver. If it wasn't, then there'd be no need for it and work on the project could take any form over any timeframe.

> I'd actually like someone to name an open source software project that we all know and love that hasn't benefited from immense institutional support.

OpenSSH might count, from the rant on their homepage:

Please take note of our Who uses it page, which list just some of the vendors who incorporate OpenSSH into their own products -- as a critically important security / access feature -- instead of writing their own SSH implementation or purchasing one from another vendor. This list specifically includes companies like Cisco, Juniper, Apple, Red Hat, and Novell; but probably includes almost all router, switch or unix-like operating system vendors. In the 10 years since the inception of the OpenSSH project, these companies have contributed not even a dime of thanks in support of the OpenSSH project (despite numerous requests).

While the mentioned companies don't donate, others do. Including Mozilla/GoDaddy with $10,000 a piece.

> I'd actually like someone to name an open source software project that we all know and love that hasn't benefited from immense institutional support.

Honest question, what about Debian? I know they had a year of FSF sponsorship back in like '94 but they seem to be heavily volunteer based with even the Project Leader keeping a day-job to pay the bills. I know they take in donations but they're generally who I point to as an example of what a Free/Open Source Software project can be.

edit: '93-->'94

Fair enough, I didn't say this, but my point was more to highlight that people who take in donations are on the right side of the argument, not the wrong side. There are good open source projects that don't take "institutional" support (though who know what work is being done on company time), but they take donations. Let us praise them for doing so.

Once an open source project has enough traction, there is generally little need for outside donations (as companies that use the product will hire people that focus on using and improving the product). The challenge is making that cross-over from hobbyist to professional project, and that is when money is helpful.

Debian had funding at the right time, crossed the rubicon and now has enough momentum to continue. Not all projects share the same luxury, and I view the funding as an attempt to make projects more professional

Debian has ample bandwidth and systems donated to them to keep their build system, mirrors, and other infrastructure up and running.

I don't think David's grief is with software projects receiving institutional support, his issue is with software projects putting their hands out for money with the promise of something materializing. Most often the driving force behind a "successful" open source project is the sheer good will and motivation of creating something that solves people's problems. The examples you've given (Linux, Nginx) are proof of this.

I can't help but wonder if this blog post would have been received better had it been written by someone not as wealthy as David.

While I agree with your general sentiment, there is also an observer bias inherent in your evidence that "open source is patently not better than closed source". There's a lot of closed source software that is crap, that, obviously, you won't see on github.

My point is that open source software is better wherever we see it. Wherever we don't see it, it probably sucks.

I have seen closed source software where the difference between crap and not-crap (for my specific need at the time) would be <5 lines of code. If I had the source to them (+ the ability to build it without spending a week), then they'd become 'not-crap' that very day.

I'd actually like someone to name an open source software project that we all know and love that hasn't benefited from immense institutional support.

Rails 1.0

+1. I was going to say this but you said it better. My hackles go up when people say open source is better. That's true sometimes but it most certainly is not always true and I've argued for years that open source is usually a better (or worse) copy of some closed source thing that someone found useful and didn't like that it was closed.

Well of course it's not true when you re-frame the argument into a strawman like that. A large percentage of proprietary programs are also blatant copies or ripoffs of something else. The issue that we're trying to get to is that free/open source software is principally better, not that all open source software is always less buggy or more featureful than the proprietary software it's intended to replace. Obviously that would be a ridiculous assumption, anyone who's seen all the crap throwaway projects on github can attest to it.

Actually I think it's the other way around: Institutions benefited enormously from open source software. They saw the chance to get rid of proprietary systems and use the force of the community and they took it because it was PROFITABLE for them to do so!

Why did IBM, Google, etc. Choose Linux as a platform? Out of courtesy? :-)