The only people entitled to say how open source should work are the people who run the projects, and their scope of entitlement extends only to their own projects.
Just because someone has opened some sources does not mean they owe the world a change in their status, focus, and effort, for example from inventor to community manager.
As an open source user you are not entitled to anything. You are not entitled to contribute. You are not entitled to the facilities. You are not entitled to the attention of others. You are not entitled to have your complaints valued. You are not entitled to this explanation.
If you have expectations (of others) that are not being met, those expectations are your own responsibility. You are responsible for your own needs. If you want things, make them.
Open source is a licensing and distribution mechanism, period. This means you get the source of the software and the rights to use and modify it. All the social notions associated with it, including the idea of ’community-driven-development’, are part of a recently invented mythology that has little basis in how things actually work, a mythology that embodies a cult-like lack of support for diversity in the way things are. can do A broad sense of work and community empowerment.
If you think Cognitect is not doing anything for the community, or not listening to the community, then you are absolutely wrong. However, you are not entitled to get the effort, focus, or feedback you want. We have to make our own choices regarding our time and life.
At Cognitect, we have to come to work every day to earn a living. We do not receive any royalties of any kind from Closer. We are not building Clojure for profit in any way. Less than 1% of Clojure users are our consultants or product customers, and thus contribute to our livelihood.
We take some of what we earn, money that could for example go into our retirement savings and instead use it to hire people to work on closures and community outreach, some full-time. Honestly, I could use that money in my retirement account had it been depleted to make the closure in the first place. But I love working with the team at Clojure and am proud of the work we do.
Alex Miller is extremely attentive to and engaged with the Clojure community. He and Stu Halloway and I meet regularly and discuss community issues. Alex, at my direction, spends most of his time either working on features for the community or assessing patches and bug reports. I spend significant part of my time designing these features – spec, tools.deps, error handling and other features to come. This time is time taken from earning a living.
I am grateful for the community’s contributions. Each Clojure release contains multiple contributions. The vast majority of the user community does not contribute, and does not wish to contribute. And that’s okay. Open source is no-strings-attached GiftAnd all participants should recognize it as such.
The closure process is not closed, but it Is conservative. I think Clojure benefits a lot from that conservatism, unlike some other projects with high churn rates and feature bloat. If you disagree or imagine otherwise, that’s too bad. This is my life and I will not spend it arguing/conversing on the internet. Write your own stuff and run your own projects as you see fit.
We can always do more, but it’s ridiculous to claim that the core team stands in the way of meaningful contributions to Clojure, because the opportunities are abundant: in library development, outreach, training, tutorials, documentation, giving talks, building tools, etc.
And yes, from patch to core. Did you know that most patches/issues have poor problem descriptions, no description of the plan (read my code!), no consideration of alternatives, no testing, no design, and are ill-conceived and/or broken in some way? Community efforts at triage matter Very Thanks to Nicola, Clock and many others for moving things forward!
Now is the time to re-examine preconceptions about open source. The erosion of morale among creators is a real thing. Your assumptions and how you act on them are your responsibility and yours alone. I’m not going to answer for them or to them.
If the way Clojure works isn’t for you, a process that produced Clojure in the first place, then paradoxically, so be it. I’m sure you know better about a correct way to write software. But please don’t burn the community with selfish proclamations on your way out. Yes, everyone has the right to their opinion, but, tragedy of the common people and so on.
I encourage everyone who grinds their teeth with negativity about what they think they can’t do, instead choose something positive that they can and do it.
Rich
ps My partners and colleagues at Cognitect were not consulted regarding this message – I’m sure they would have overruled me. These opinions are mine alone.
PPS I think most people in the Clojure community are wonderful and positive. If you don’t recognize yourself in the above message, this is not for you/about you!
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