On Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 4:13 AM, // ravi <ravi at platosbeard.org> wrote:
> Donations to Free Software, I agree, are a great idea and often necessary.
There's a dark side of donations. From the creator of my favorite software project:
"It has become clear to me that accepting donations and funding
has created an unreasonable sense of entitlement among some in the
community as to what I do with my time. I built Clojure as an
independent person, and remain such, despite any mismatched
expectations around contributions. I truly appreciate those who
have contributed to Clojure financially this past year, and can
honestly say I've repaid those contributions manyfold with my
time.
"Clojure development will continue to be funded primarily, as it
has throughout its history, through other commercial endeavors on
my part, and, moving forward, on the part of Clojure/core. I am
stopping the funding appeal so that it is completely clear that
my/our continuing work on Clojure is an ongoing gift."
[From http://clojure.org/funding]
Of course, I'm definitely not implying that donating is bad. It's very helpful. I'm just pointing out an interesting phenomenon, where it is possible to alienate certain creators of your free software from their own work, especially if they created it out of a spirit of curiosity and fun, and love listening and helping their users.
Possible lessons:
* need to unlearn the impulse to devalue someone's work because it's
available for free/cheap. (Every vaguely-attentive software
consultant has been explicitly warned of this impulse.)
* try not to act as an entitled customer-boss. Thank them as you would
someone who just helped you (maybe not in an overly effusive way,
but a pleasant note is always good). Such people usually hear more
complaints than thanks.
* programmers are often socialized to be opinionated, miserly assholes
to each other. If you release software, you maybe don't want other
programmers as your customers. Fuck 'em. (Except for the
early-adopters, who probably are wonderful helpful people.)
BTW, I'm sure this phenomenon also happens in families. How many mothers are slowly-but-surely alienated from childcare, ultimately harming the child?
All the best, Tj
On Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 4:13 AM, // ravi <ravi at platosbeard.org> wrote:
> On Apr 9, 2011, at 9:03 PM, brandelune at gmail.com wrote:
>> On 9 avr. 11, at 12:53, Fernando Cassia wrote:
>>
>>> On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 10:46 PM, <brandelune at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Indeed. And if people donated to free software as much as they spend on proprietary crapware then there are plenty of things that would be fixed and improved.
>>>
>>> No need to "donate". You do know that most of the coders of "free
>>> software" are on a company payroll, don´t you?.
>>
>> If you mean that a lot if not most free software coders have day jobs, then yes, that's a fact. If you mean that most free software coders are paid to write free software, then I think we don't live in the same universe.
>>
>> The people who make a living by writing free software code are a very small minority in the free software communities.
>>
>
> I agree with your general sentiment, but I differ a bit on what percentage of free software developers are paid to do so. It used to be the case that this was small, but now that everyone from IBM to Google has jumped into capitalising on F/OSS, there are hordes of GNU/Linux, WebKit, etc programmers whose day job is to contribute to these projects.
>
>
>> Last but not least, "coding" is only one part of developing professional grade free software. Documentation writing, localization, hardware testing, debugging, promotion, all those activities require time and are thus very costly. I am not even talking about the development infrastructure and organization.
>
>
> Amen!
>
> Donations to Free Software, I agree, are a great idea and often necessary. E.g: the primary developer of the Perl/ObjC/Cocoa bridge posted a year or two ago about how he was actually strapped for cash and hadn't been able to get a job! It's a strange world we live in.
>
> --ravi
>
>
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