I very much hope your voluntary donation approach works. I
suspect the best chance of making it work is if you regularly
remind-people-of/market/promote the idea of donating. That is,
I believe there is a lot of goodwill out there, and a lot of people
will have good intentions, but it is easy for these good intentions
to not translate into actual donations. Of course, there needs to
be a healthy balance between promoting the idea enough and
doing it so much that people get annoyed. But I think it should
be possible to get the balance right.
Hopefully the donation approach is a success, but if not, may I
suggest a Plan B. And that is that at any point in time you have
two versions of Clojure going:
* a proprietary version of "the latest and greatest"; and
* an open source version which is "1 year old" (or something
like that).
Each proprietary release would include in the licence "from date
XX/XX/XXXX and onwards, this release may be used under the
open source licencing terms ...". This would give proprietary users
the guarantee that at some point the version of clojure they are
using would become open source.
Proprietary users would be paying for the ability to use the latest
and greatest. If the licence fee were reasonable, then this, together
with the goodwill factor, I hope would be enough to get people to
finance the project.
This approach seems to me to be a good compromise between
open source and proprietary funding. It provides all the benefits of
open source over time, yet provides a tangible reason for paying
licence fees beyond just goodwill. It also means that employees
who are part of businesses that can't understand voluntary donations,
can more easily justify the expenditure.
Don't get me wrong, I think the voluntary donation model is the best
one - if it works - and so is worth a shot. But if it doesn't work
out,
I offer this alternative model as one that might be worth considering.
Cheers,
Mark P.
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