4 ms·

> they work crazy hard to build and shepherd something awesome for free. I'm not so sure about that. I'd say that Clojure now exists and thrives to help Cogni

> they work crazy hard to build and shepherd something awesome for free. I'm not so sure about that. I'd say that Clojure now exists and thrives to help Cognitect make money. This is no way a bad thing, only a reminder that there is no such thing as a free lunch. In a similar vein, Go exists to help make Google money. The original purpose of open sourcing it was different for Google (make the language more robust/better) than it was for Hickey (grow the language/community).

brandonbloom 10y ago
I anticipated this response to the word "free", but I stand by my statement. Clojure is _free_. If you don't want Cognitect stuff, don't use it. If you don't like how Rich/Cognitect et al are running the project, take your EPL licensed ball and go home. Similarly, in the case of Go: Substitute Rob/Google and BSD-ish license. Just because these languages serve the interests of their respective maintainers does not make them any less free to you. It may make the community less useful to _you_, but hey, they created these things to be useful to them. There's an implicitly mutually beneficial social contract around contributions and community. If you don't like that contract, don't use the language. In the very unlikely case that Cognitect or Google puts some company-specific stuff in the language in a way that actively destroys the good will of this social contract, then and only then do you have any right to complain.
- jgalt212 10y ago
  > does not make them any less free to you Of course not, but it does make them unencumbered. And I'm not complaining. I'm just saying that's cost (i.e. not free) of doing business with a sponsored open source language.
  - brandonbloom 10y ago
    If you take the stance of "nothing is free", then the word "free" isn't particularly useful.
    - jgalt212 10y ago
      A+ extreme reductionism. I never said "nothing is free", nor implied that, but merely that users need to cognizant of the goals of "free" language maintainers (especially when there is a corporation rather than a person as BDFL) that do not necessarily align with the goals of the median or average user. Now that we are on this topic, I'm starting to think maybe it's worth paying for a programming language so that the goals of the maintainers are better aligned with the goals of the users. That being said, there is real value to the ability inspect the source. As such, it's very difficult to do open source as a paid product.
      - calibraxis 10y ago
        There is a history here. Please read: 1. https://web.archive.org/web/20100220100027/http://clojure.org/funding https://web.archive.org/web/20100220100027/http://clojure.or... 2. https://web.archive.org/web/20140704050611/http://clojure.org/funding https://web.archive.org/web/20140704050611/http://clojure.or... My own interpretation: programmer culture has such problems that someone actually considered corporate funding healthier than user donations.
        snaky 10y ago
        There are many definitions of the term 'healthier'. But the links are pretty amusing. And now we have a first fork https://github.com/jaunt-lang/jaunt https://github.com/jaunt-lang/jaunt
- dllthomas 10y ago
  There is a distinction between "Clojure is free" (talking about the burden on the consumer) and "Hickey et al work on Clojure for free" (talking about the rewards they receive for their effort). The latter is less clearly the case.
snaky 10y ago
> The original purpose of open sourcing Go was different for Google (make the language more robust/better) I'm not so sure about that. I like the 'baseball cap' argument more. The quote is about React, but it may be relevant for Go as well > Facebook doesn't care if you use the Web, it only cares that you use Facebook. > So why release an open source Web framework at all? Because Facebook is battling Google for engineers. So you've got a big fight between two companies over which company is the coolest place to work, and both of them are companies that your grandparents love. How are you going to win this fight? One way is to have the hippest Web framework. > Basically, both Google and Facebook are desperate to find a baseball cap that they can put on backwards. Angular is Google's baseball cap. React is Facebook's. https://www.pandastrike.com/posts/20150311-react-bad-idea https://www.pandastrike.com/posts/20150311-react-bad-idea

brandonbloom 10y ago

I anticipated this response to the word "free", but I stand by my statement. Clojure is _free_. If you don't want Cognitect stuff, don't use it. If you don't like how Rich/Cognitect et al are running the project, take your EPL licensed ball and go home. Similarly, in the case of Go: Substitute Rob/Google and BSD-ish license. Just because these languages serve the interests of their respective maintainers does not make them any less free to you. It may make the community less useful to _you_, but hey, they created these things to be useful to them. There's an implicitly mutually beneficial social contract around contributions and community. If you don't like that contract, don't use the language. In the very unlikely case that Cognitect or Google puts some company-specific stuff in the language in a way that actively destroys the good will of this social contract, then and only then do you have any right to complain.

jgalt212 10y ago
> does not make them any less free to you Of course not, but it does make them unencumbered. And I'm not complaining. I'm just saying that's cost (i.e. not free) of doing business with a sponsored open source language.
- brandonbloom 10y ago
  If you take the stance of "nothing is free", then the word "free" isn't particularly useful.
  - jgalt212 10y ago
    A+ extreme reductionism. I never said "nothing is free", nor implied that, but merely that users need to cognizant of the goals of "free" language maintainers (especially when there is a corporation rather than a person as BDFL) that do not necessarily align with the goals of the median or average user. Now that we are on this topic, I'm starting to think maybe it's worth paying for a programming language so that the goals of the maintainers are better aligned with the goals of the users. That being said, there is real value to the ability inspect the source. As such, it's very difficult to do open source as a paid product.
    - calibraxis 10y ago
      There is a history here. Please read: 1. https://web.archive.org/web/20100220100027/http://clojure.org/funding https://web.archive.org/web/20100220100027/http://clojure.or... 2. https://web.archive.org/web/20140704050611/http://clojure.org/funding https://web.archive.org/web/20140704050611/http://clojure.or... My own interpretation: programmer culture has such problems that someone actually considered corporate funding healthier than user donations.
      - snaky 10y ago
        There are many definitions of the term 'healthier'. But the links are pretty amusing. And now we have a first fork https://github.com/jaunt-lang/jaunt https://github.com/jaunt-lang/jaunt
dllthomas 10y ago
There is a distinction between "Clojure is free" (talking about the burden on the consumer) and "Hickey et al work on Clojure for free" (talking about the rewards they receive for their effort). The latter is less clearly the case.

snaky 10y ago

> The original purpose of open sourcing Go was different for Google (make the language more robust/better) I'm not so sure about that. I like the 'baseball cap' argument more. The quote is about React, but it may be relevant for Go as well > Facebook doesn't care if you use the Web, it only cares that you use Facebook. > So why release an open source Web framework at all? Because Facebook is battling Google for engineers. So you've got a big fight between two companies over which company is the coolest place to work, and both of them are companies that your grandparents love. How are you going to win this fight? One way is to have the hippest Web framework. > Basically, both Google and Facebook are desperate to find a baseball cap that they can put on backwards. Angular is Google's baseball cap. React is Facebook's. https://www.pandastrike.com/posts/20150311-react-bad-idea https://www.pandastrike.com/posts/20150311-react-bad-idea