Wow, now I want to contribute anyway, as a token of respect... and I don't even use clojure!
Patches, bug reports are welcome :)
Rich Hickey stops Clojure funding appeal from 2011 onwards
31–40 of 77 posts
Re: Rich Hickey stops Clojure funding appeal from 2011 onwards
#32Possible reason behind the decision - http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=2053908
I sure hope not. Most responses seemed to disagree and even technomancy wasn't happy with the characterization of his part. If you take every criticism personally instead of looking at the whole, it's a recipe for being miserable.
Re: Rich Hickey stops Clojure funding appeal from 2011 onwards
#33Re: Rich Hickey stops Clojure funding appeal from 2011 onwards
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that really true though? If Company XYZ is your biggest support contract, they'll have influence over you, wouldn't they?
they'll have influence over you, wouldn't they? Only for the items relevant to the contract terms.
I don't think you understand what I'm saying. There's no terms at all in the donation-based giving, and yet people think they have influence. Contracts get renegotiated all the time. What would prevent Company XYZ from exerting pressure along the lines of "we want you to do [abc] or we're not renewing?"
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. :)
Re: Rich Hickey stops Clojure funding appeal from 2011 onwards
#35Why not accept donations with the explicit disclaimer that under no circumstances will Rich's development efforts be swayed?
Re: Rich Hickey stops Clojure funding appeal from 2011 onwards
#36Why not accept donations with the explicit disclaimer that under no circumstances will Rich's development efforts be swayed?
I think human psychology just doesn't work that way.
Re: Rich Hickey stops Clojure funding appeal from 2011 onwards
#37Why not accept donations with the explicit disclaimer that under no circumstances will Rich's development efforts be swayed?
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Re: Rich Hickey stops Clojure funding appeal from 2011 onwards
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
they'll have influence over you, wouldn't they? Only for the items relevant to the contract terms.
I don't think you understand what I'm saying. There's no terms at all in the donation-based giving, and yet people think they have influence. Contracts get renegotiated all the time. What would prevent Company XYZ from exerting pressure along the lines of "we want you to do [abc] or we're not renewing?" 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 sa…
1) "Company XYZ" doesn't do anything. There are people making the decision.
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.
Re: Rich Hickey stops Clojure funding appeal from 2011 onwards
#39Good for him, no donations should translate in to obligations, they're donations , voluntary and are considered to be a reward for services rendered in the past, not the future. 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…
I wonder whether most donors actually understand this, with non-donors being the primary complainers.
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.
Re: Rich Hickey stops Clojure funding appeal from 2011 onwards
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Corporate support != corporate sponsorship. 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.
Is that really true though? If Company XYZ is your biggest support contract, they'll have influence over you, wouldn't they?
I assume Rich is selling exactly this. Company XYZ wants $hard_to_implement_feature. Company gives Rich money specifically so he'll implement $hard_to_implement_feature, and then they get $hard_to_implement_feature.
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.