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#off-topic
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2019-08-30
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theeternalpulse18:08:06

interesting that I found a random Rich Hickey quote in this article https://feross.org/funding-experiment-recap/ wonder if it's a little out of context :thinking_face:

seancorfield18:08:35

I wish more OSS maintainers would publicly echo Rich's words, TBH.

seancorfield18:08:11

I've been an OSS contributor for over 25 years at this point. I've never asked for money. Same as when I blogged very actively in the early 2000's while I was at Macromedia (Jeremy Allaire encouraged my team to start blogging) and I saw many blogs running ads to generate revenue and I decided I would never do that (and told my readers that).

seancorfield18:08:27

But I made that conscious decision not to benefit financially (in any direct way) from my OSS or blogging work -- and in exchange I do not consider anyone entitled to anything from me: not my time, not bug fixes, not new features, nada. If you want something else, pay me as a consultant or contribute it yourself.

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seancorfield18:08:40

I like to think that all that time/effort spent has benefited me in indirect ways tho'...

skuttleman18:08:26

I can only imagine how frustrating facing that entitlement is after putting so much work into giving the world something for free.

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walterl19:08:44

@U04V70XH6 That's a great model and stance. Which model do you prefer for more commercial open source ventures?

seancorfield19:08:49

@UJY23QLS1 Not quite sure what you're asking there? How an OSS author/company can make a living? If your project is popular enough, offer consulting around it (which is basically what I said above).

seancorfield19:08:40

That's what Cognitect does, essentially, and their previous incarnations too (back when they were originally a Ruby consultancy although I don't know how much OSS they did back then).

seancorfield19:08:28

There are a lot of companies, large and small, that make their "living" from consulting services (including commercial support) based around the OSS project(s) that they maintain.

walterl19:08:25

Yeah, I see how that can scale. I assumed you were referring to small, one-person projects, but that isn't a given. 👍

seancorfield19:08:01

I'm fortunate to have a full time job that "allows" me to work on OSS for some time during work hours -- and that's been true for me for decades, partly because I've made it a condition of employment (and I won't work for companies that do not support OSS in some capacity).

seancorfield19:08:15

Back when I did CFML for a living, I contributed to a lot of OSS frameworks (MVC, DI/AOP, ORM) and as a freelancer that enabled me to get paid gigs consulting on projects around those frameworks.

dominicm02:08:09

We are oss lovers at JUXT, but it's definitely hard to reconcile billing hours with OSS. Especially on projects like Edge. I spend a lot of my time making the docs nice and thinking about it. Nobody internally is knocking the door down for me to do those things, people are generally pretty happy internally. So am I producing value for the company? It's hard to measure.

seancorfield04:08:29

Yeah, at WSN the general thinking is that if we use an OSS library, we can justify doing (some) work on it during the day. It's harder to justify working on OSS libraries that we don't use. It's why I've had to hand off congomongo (in Clojure) and a bunch of stuff in CFML (now that we no longer use it).

seancorfield04:08:25

JDBC stuff is core to what we do so that's easy to justify (even the docs 🙂 ). core.cache / core.memoize are fairly core as well. tools.cli is less core these days. honeysql, depstar too. clj-new is a "side project" 🙂

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seancorfield04:08:52

And expectations.clojure.test 🙂