I'm sorry, but I find the whole "donate" thing a little off-putting. I've just started looking into Clojure, and the thought that the key developer might just stop working on it doesn't exactly give me a warm fuzzy feeling. Now the evaluation will have to include looking at the community, and trying to decide if Clojure could survive Rich departing it(*).
Part of it is that I don't recall any other open source software movement having dunned me for money before - and that's with having been using, writing, and contributing to such for over 20 years now. In particular, Larry Wall managed to grow Perl from a cute little report generation language he used to get his work done at Unisys to a specification rivaling CL in size without dunning users for money. Larry - and others I know who've worked on open source - did this in part by having a position with employers who realized that the tools helped them do their job, and would let them release the results unencumbered. I think Rich mentioned that sort of thing in his long posting, but it's not really something to hope for these days. But they also did other things. Many of them were regulars running tutorials on their software at Usenix meetings, which paid a pretty penny at the time. They also did talks, lectures and tutorials elsewhere for a fee. From what's been said here, Rich is an excellent speaker - possibly something like that would help? They also made money writing books and doing contract work, including custom code that was later released under an open source license. The classic example of the latter is Cygnus Solutions, which made money porting GNU to new chips while under NDA until it was sold to red hat, turning all the people working for it into millionaires. Yeah, I realize that those things don't contribute directly to Clojure, probably aren't as much fun as working on Clojure (for those of us who think of working inside LISP systems as fun), and would almost certainly cut into the development time available for Clojure. But as a potential Clojure user/developer, I'd be a lot more comfortable if the message was "By donating, you'll free Clojure development time" or maybe even the typical donationware message of "Donate to have your feature requests/bug reports given higher priority" than the current one of"I may not be able to continue developing if you don't donate". One last thought: Clojure was designed to help deal with concurrency, something no really popular language does well. Seems that the people interested in funding research into that aer the ones putting multiCPU boxes on people's desks: AMD & Intel. The Java link - as well as Sun's history of dealing with multi-cpu systems - makes Sun an obvious choice, but between the potential Oracle purchase and the financial difficulties that lead to it, that's another thing that's not exactly a warm fuzzy feeling. <mike *) I don't know Rich, and haven't seen much from him directly. I have no idea how likely this is to happen, and don't mean to imply that it will. That's yet another task that this change has added to my evaluation process. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
