Funding Clojure 2010
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Clojure is the most exciting environment I've used for years. I've spent most of this year learning to write and actually writing non-trivial programs in Clojure. It's been a fun ride, the best one for years!
With Clojure programming becomes, instead of fighting small but bugging issues with the system, following your curiosity instead.
Rich was spending way too much time on clojure, but he wasn't making a living at all out of it. Just from what Clojure has taught me on concurrency and time management, it's been worth every dollar. I wish I was a company and I could dip my hands into deeper pockets.
[EDIT: Rick/Rich ... there are too many Rick/Rich in my life. Thanks for the notice.]
I donated $100 so that Rich Hickey can continue working full-time to make Clojure even better. You should read more <a href=" http://clojure.org/funding ">here</a> and click the "donate" button at the bottom of that page.
http://ericlavigne.wordpress.com/2008/12/18/compojure-on-a-s...
http://ericlavigne.wordpress.com/2008/12/28/using-postgresql...
http://ericlavigne.wordpress.com/2009/01/04/compojure-securi...
http://ericlavigne.wordpress.com/2009/02/11/clojure-presenta...
I started following the language around October 2008 and I've seen the mailing list go from 500 to close to 3K. Amid this growth both the mailing list and the IRC channel have remained helpful and friendly. Useful tools are popping up everywhere, and more and more people are using it as the secret sauce in their projects.
And even if you don't like the language (being a Lisp), it's hard to deny that Clojure's ubiquitous use of persistent data structures and rich variety of concurrency primitives have made what previously seemed academic and esoteric concepts practical and everyday.
If you're a Clojure fan or even an open source advocate, think about chipping in!
I have a feeling 2010 will be yet another great year for Clojure ;)
I've seen other open source projects jump through these hoops specifically for those reasons. Getting a few of those folks lined up for "The Clojure Foundation" is probably a faster route to being sustainable than $100 at a time.
That said: I'm neither a lawyer nor an accountant, so take that with a large dosage of salt
But there is overhead involved, setting it up, filing returns, etc..
I don't know a lot about Clojure, but if it is gaining a following for some sort of commercial application, it would make sense to start "The Clojure Company" and sell support contracts, training, etc.; if this is the case there's no reason this guy should be asking for handouts (he should be raising funding!). But again, hoping people from the Clojure community can enlighten me.
I am sure some large Silicon Valley company could hire him to add to their pet collection, but that'd be totally boring, especially if Clojure has real commercial applications...
Edit: I should note -- if there aren't any specific domains in which Clojure is either necessary or an improvement, it may just be a nice curiosity (like most programming languages), and the author is making a wise decision; again, I know very little.
Training, with an emphasis on why Clojure matters and how it can help your org?
I thought Clojure hit the tipping point this year. I'm surprised Rick Hickey is hurting for money.
He hasn't written any books and doesn't charge for anything - all that has been available for him so far is the "Donate" link on clojure.org, but it's never really been publicized.
It's not much in the big picture, but I suppose every little bit helps.
Rich knows he could probably do just fine consulting on Clojure. However that means he doesn't get to ... work on Clojure.
He's basically saying, "Hey guys, I want to keep hacking on this thing like a madman as I have for 3 years now. I don't want to do side projects. Let's make it happen".
It reminds me a bit about Benedict de Spinoza and Robert Musil. In both cases friends were fascinated by their writing, and they pooled some money together so the writer could - focus on writing.
I've been thinking about picking up Clojure in my spare time and if I find that it suits my needs you can be sure I'll be donating.
Is seems the only "business models" for open source development, for the love of it, are akin to historic patronage systems.
The difference is that one can now have "crowd patronage" rather than court patronage. However that still depends on being both very lucky and very good. I hope Rich Hickey is the former, clojure speaks for itself on the latter.
I would certainly be willing to buy 1 share of CLOJ. Isn't that how companies are supposed to raise capital?
I say this as a huge open source fan, but one of the things about paying for proprietary software that works is that it helps to solve this problem: it connects the author/s of the software directly with the money they feel is appropriate for their product. If the price is right, they earn money and (hopefully) reinvest some in the product. If the price is wrong or the product crappy, it goes away.
By the way: I don't mean to pick on you, of course, and I think your gesture is a very kind one. I just picked someone at random amongst the donors.
I donated $100, and I'll do so again in January.
If you doubt this is the right thing to do, just listen to the man, any of his presentations will do.
It makes me happy :)
Companies sponsoring Clojure will also have the side-effect of the project having a close interaction with industry and its needs.. which may accelerate its uptake.
Hopefully it turns out well.
Voluntary doesn't always work but is always preferable over forced.
True, you would lose conventional market incentives, but you would gain all the benefits that history has shown come from open source: higher quality, lower cost, free exchange of ideas, etc.
For projects such as Clojure, which don't have an obvious business model, there is no better way to secure funding.
Force should be used when it will yield great benefits for society.
I agree with you that force should be used when it will yield great benefits. But I would define the greatest benefit to be liberty. Force should be used to defend liberty. The freedom govern one's own life and make one's own decisions is worth a lot more than the benefits of open-source software.
The irony is that societies that value freedom over more tangible benefits like software tend to have more of both than societies that give up freedom for material benefits.
Sure this is idealism, but it's idealism that's worth at least arguing and voting for. If you personally don't have enough money to support all the causes you want to support, persuade others to join you, don't try to force them.
Also, one reason for you having less money is that government has taken a lot of it to fund things that other voters have thought important enough to sacrifice your freedom for. Don't perpetuate the problem.
Besides, if Rick really wanted to, he could charge for clojure as he explains in his appeal. He could in effect, force his users to make the choice to fund him or forego using his product. Right now, users are not forced to make this choice. But that choice is still available to them. If he could get government funding by simply being open source, he would in effect be taking away users' choice to fund him. Users would be forced to fund him whether or not they used his product.
There are lots of examples of OSS being funded through a variety of ways without well meaning folks robbing other peoples money.
From the first two sentences of the linked Wikipedia article:
"In economics, a public good is a good that is non-rivalrous and non-excludable. This means, respectively, that consumption of the good by one individual does not reduce availability of the good for consumption by others; and that no one can be effectively excluded from using the good."
I think you would be hard pressed to find a better example than open source software.
Yes, obviously open source can be funded in a variety of ways, but supply falls short of demand due to the free-rider problem. How many more Rich Hickeys could we have if open-source software was a safe career decision?
You're right that OSS is a great example of a free rider problem, but your cure is worse than the disease.
All we need is a few government sanctioned pg's, judging whether or not various projects are worthy of taxpayer dollars.
I use Ubuntu, which is composed of thousands of individual projects. Who would decide which ones get how much money? How about the ones developed by 'foreigners' (defined as !citizens of the country paying for development)? Could 'foreigners' just free-ride on whatever government paying for all this open source development? How about new, upcoming and potentially competitive projects? At what point should they get funded, or should the government attempt to pick a winner?
I'm no libertarian, but the problems are not at all insignificant, and while I agree that software is close to being a public good (some exclusion is possible), I am by no means convinced that it ought to be supplied by the government.
Also: my wife is a scientist, and I have come to realize that programming is a way more open, "stand on the shoulders of giants" field than theirs is in many ways.
Have a few experts decide which projects to fund. Give people 50 to 100K a year to cover their living expenses. Anything they produce goes under a commercial friendly license like BSD. Everybody wins.
Does open source not facilitate the sharing of ideas? Would this not make it easier to stand on the shoulders of giants?
It's an extreme ideal that would be insanely problematic in practice.
How does the government decide who gets funding to do 'open source' and who doesn't? How much are they allowed? How is their 'success/worth' measured? How does the government ensure they're getting value for money? What if the project becomes commercial? Do the government own some of that? Should they get some of their money back?
Personally, I would be against government funding of OSS. Government is involved in too many things as it is. We don't need them involved in OSS as well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation
Actually, now that I think of it, Clojure may fall within their scope...
http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=503220&o...
But they are a large organization, geared mainly toward industry and academia. They list a "small-project" as "up to $500,000 over three years". It's not quite the lightweight organization I would like to see.
What I would really like to see is something like a cross between NSF and YCombinator.
Don't get me wrong, it's extremely valuable, but it's "building stuff" rather than furthering science.
The reason government funds research is because the value provided by basic research cannot be easily captured and sold. This same logic applies to OSS.
Why is it ok for taxpayer dollars to go toward research but not toward building stuff that wouldn't otherwise get built?
New programming languages aren't really coming up with anything that's particularly new. They're just solving the same problems in different ways. This is one area where I would be absolutely against taxpayer funding.
Consider if we decided to constantly invent new spoken languages, in order to communicate with each other more concisely. Maybe English 2.0 would come with 50% less ambiguity and 20% less verboseness. Maybe version 3.0 would do away with the letters Z Q X. Would that be a good use of taxpayers money? Shall we also fund all the translation of libraries books to the new language?
Constantly inventing new programming languages (I would say) often does more harm than good.
The issue is that furthering science clearly has benefits to society. Making yet another open source hip language probably doesn't.
People enjoy hacking. Things get built usually because it's enjoyable, or because there's a real need for it. I think the current situation works pretty well.
Just my 2c on the subject.
Now, Clojure may or may not be a project worth funding. That is a question worth exploring. But what about say, making better tools for programmers? Building experimental user interfaces? Any of a million other things you or I could be working on that are hard to translate directly into cash, yet could contribute greatly to society.
Imagine being able to work on these things full time, with a steady paycheck; being able to freely share our code and discuss our work with one another, cooperating to make it better. Tell me that doesn't sound nice.
Hobbyists can only do so much in their free time. Full time development only gets done when it forwards a narrow corporate interest. And then you have the free-rider problem. But now I'm repeating myself, so I'll leave it at that.
Someone has to decide whether building a particular new bridge or hospital is more or less important than Rich Hickey building Clojure or Monty Widenius building MySQL.
Right now I don't see how open source development is connected to that democratic decision making process (apart from research grants) and I don't know that I want to see it connected to be honest.
The 'textbook' definition is 'non-excludable and non-rivalrous', meaning: you can't stop people from benefiting from it (non-excludable) and one person's benefit doesn't 'use it up' for another person (non-rivalrous).
Well, you can exclude people from using software in a variety of ways (secrecy/contracts, technical measures, copyright law). That someone chooses to give software away doesn't make it 'non-excludable' and thus subject to classic public-goods analysis.
Also, the choice of how to provide non-excludable goods that may be challenging to finance doesn't reduce simply to "if free riders are a problem, then taxpayers should fund". Lots of other cultural/institutional arrangements are possible -- the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics went to work into the variety of arrangements used by societies to manage common resources.
A movement to have 'taxpayers' subsidize open source is just as likely to lead to overfunding for the wrong reasons as 'right-sized funding' which exactly offsets the underproduction theoretically caused by free-riders.
I didn't know about the 2009 Nobel stuff. Can you point me to a layman's summary by any chance?
I think you are overreaching when you say my scheme "is just as likely to lead to overfunding". Qualified economists could determine the budget. The money would be guided by intelligent judges toward worthy projects. Surely an imperfect solution is better than ignoring the problem.
That novelty cuts both ways. That an open source software producer can't capture the full value by charging a fee would tend to lead to underproduction. But costless communication, redistribution, and sharing-back means they get value in many other ways -- reputation, code improvements, increased sales of excludable complement products, etc.
This is again why the analysis has to be more sophisticated than "if free riders are a problem, then taxpayers should fund".
The Nobel winner was Elinor Ostrum. MarginalRevolution had a high-level summary:
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/10...
"Qualified economists could determine the budget"? With this and your comment about "a few government sanctioned pg's" I see that you put a lot more trust in disinterested experts and bureaucrats to hand out large sums of money than I do. That process -- boards of politically-favored individuals handing out money -- does not converge on the optimal level of funding/production. We know that with as much certainty as we know there can be problems with private underprovision of classical public goods.
But really, what is the "problem" for which an "imperfect solution" is better than nothing? Open source is booming. People love to create it even for nonmonetary reasons -- so perhaps we already have an inefficient surplus. (Maybe hobbyist open source work should be taxed!)
Meanwhile, governments are having a hard time managing their traditional public goods duties and tax flows in an efficient, sustainable manner. You want to give them a new portfolio of economic responsibilities?
There's a "donate" button in the front page: http://clojure.org/