Rich Hickey stops Clojure funding appeal from 2011 onwards

http://clojure.org/funding

by zaph0d • 16 years ago

216 68 16 years ago

clojure.org

zaph0d6• 16 years ago

Possible reason behind the decision - http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=2053908

jacquesm3• 16 years ago

I doubt that was the whole of it but it probably didn't help.

aero142• 16 years ago

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.

ShardPhoenix• 16 years ago

Combined with Hickey's post in that thread, this whole thing strikes me as rather petulant - "throwing the toys out of the pram" as the English would say.

nickik• 16 years ago

No it wasn't rich said something like it on the mailinglist befor that "Has Clojure development stalled?" Stuff witch was a big misunderstanding anyways.

cemerick4• 16 years ago

tl;dr: Rich is no longer accepting donations from individuals, but businesses (and presumably not-for-profits as well?) are still encouraged to contribute to the development effort.

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!).

jacquesm3• 16 years ago

A 14 line article is too long to read?

cemerick4• 16 years ago

You'd be surprised by how many people read only comments unless/until they're motivated to read TFA. shrug

jacquesm3• 16 years ago

Good 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 preferential treatment or even any guaranteed output level.

davidw• 16 years ago

Act 2312863 of "how to fund open source software". It's not easy. Indeed, it's pretty much impossible to extract a proportional amount of the value that users derive from your code.

andrewvc• 16 years ago

Agreed, good for Rich.

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.

EliAndrewC• 16 years ago

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.

sandGorgon• 16 years ago

interesting point - I think people who "donate" do it out of gratitude rather than creation of entitlement. By virtue of that, the complainers are less likely to come from the actual donor list.

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.

praptak• 16 years ago

Oh well. I hope that the majority of the community is not like that. Just to restore some balance in the universe: I have donated and I don't expect any obligation in return.

flatline• 16 years ago

Me too, I contributed to help him continue what he'd started, since I liked the results. If you try to change what's working, it most likely will not end up better off...

bphogan4• 16 years ago

I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around this.

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."

Seems to me he'd run into similar problems from corporate sponsorships. Am I missing something here?

hvs• 16 years ago

My guess is that if a company is willing to sponsor specific development, he is willing to negotiate. I.e. fee-for-service to some extent.

nollidge• 16 years ago

I think that's him offering corporate support contracts, not sponsorships.

bphogan4• 16 years ago

I guess I can see that. I didn't read "support" in terms of "support contract" but that does make more sense. Thanks.

barrkel• 16 years ago

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.

bphogan4• 16 years ago

Is that really true though? If Company XYZ is your biggest support contract, they'll have influence over you, wouldn't they?

DeusExMachina2• 16 years ago

I think that the difference is that this is not corporate sponsorship, but a service to corporations.

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.

blacksmythe• 16 years ago

The expectations per dollar funded are much lower for a business.

Individuals think a $100 contribution gives them some reason to bring up issues. Corporations think something similar for a $100k contribution.

zacharypinter• 16 years ago

Interesting to see Steve Yegge on the funders list, hadn't noticed that before: http://clojure.org/funders

mahmud• 16 years ago

What would be interesting about that? there are hundreds of people in that list.

zaph0d6• 16 years ago

Apparently he likes Clojure - http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2010/07/blogger-finger.html

pmorrisonfl2• 16 years ago

Wow, now I want to contribute anyway, as a token of respect... and I don't even use clojure!

zaph0d6• 16 years ago

Patches, bug reports are welcome :)

pmorrisonfl2• 16 years ago

Fair enough... guess I need to start using it!

Waywocket6• 16 years ago

>Patches, bug reports are welcome :)

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?

philjackson• 16 years ago

Why not accept donations with the explicit disclaimer that under no circumstances will Rich's development efforts be swayed?

Tichy• 16 years ago

I think human psychology just doesn't work that way.

disponsible• 16 years ago

Actually it may work. The only ones deterred by this notice would be those who donate to feel entitled, but not those who do it to show genuine appreciation for his work. And I doubt former kind even makes it to the donation form in the first place.

mark_l_watson• 16 years ago

Rich: I am sorry that you did this. Please add the PayPal donate button back onto clojure.org.

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.

dsimms• 16 years ago

AFAIK, he'll still accept paypal!

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.

masterponomo3• 16 years ago

From what I've seen, Rich does things to end controversies quickly rather than talk them to death. There was a religious war developing in the user group some time ago over licensing terms of products that were developed in Clojure. Rich didn't take a side, as I recall--he simply intervened after a few days and asked people not to carry on this discussion but to focus on technical issues. At least one heavyweight (Jon Harrop) seemed to disappear from the user group upon being asked to cut out the licensing jibber-jabber, but peace was restored.

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!

huwigs• 16 years ago

As a longtime Lisp observer, I can't say that I've ever seen Jon Harrop conduct himself as a "heavyweight" in forums unrelated to OCaml, Mathematica, or F#.

masterponomo3• 16 years ago

"heavyweight" was my opinion of him based on his education, demonstrated ability, and publications, not anything to do with his way of representing himself. I found his comments very interesting, informed as they were by his extensive work in other languages.

zaph0d6• 16 years ago

The Jon Harrop who used to hang out on the Clojure list is not the same as Dr. John Harrop who used to advocate F#, OCaml, etc.

I asked him and he said "no relation".

tomfaulhaber• 16 years ago

"my/our continuing work on Clojure is an ongoing gift"

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.

Rich Hickey stops Clojure funding appeal from 2011 onwards

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