4 ms·

Please excuse the language, but what the fuck is happening to our world right now? What the hell has happened to "I want to build something, so I'll build it"?

• ceol 15y ago
  > We're charging a cover at the door now? It's like charging a cover at the door to help write the songs for the band you want to hear.
• tptacek 15y ago
  What this is is Yehuda Katz, who has built a reputation with contributions to open source products over many years, realizing that his market value is better than "kudos" on some website. The alternative to stuff like this is Yehuda Katz writing code for some startup that you will never see. Here's Katz finding a way to make a business out of writing open source... ... and this is a bad thing? What's wrong with you?
  • nikcub 15y ago
    Lots of companies hire people to work on open source projects. It is how most of it gets written. He could probably get a job where working on this is part of it in a heartbeat. (not that I disagree with this project or method, I think he should do the same as what Google Appengine does with its installer - it is seriously awesome)
    • jeremymcanally 15y ago
      He did, actually. Much of the work he did on Merb and Rails 3 was generously funded by Engine Yard.
      • matt_yoho 15y ago
        Though I'm quite thankful Engine Yard chose to fund his work, I'd categorize doing so as an investment than a generous act. Nothing wrong with either, of course.
        • jeremymcanally 15y ago
          I would certainly agree (especially his work on Merb, since they began offering commercial Merb support and such while he was doing that). The "generously" was partially true, partially facetious. :)
  • mattetti 15y ago
    You seem to forget that he has almost always be paid for his contribution: * Merb / Rails - EngineYard * Sproutcore / Ember - Strobe (and via contract work) I myself struggle with the concept of asking $25k to build what he wants to build. But at the end of the day what I think doesn't matter what I think or how many people disagree. If enough people agree with him and support him, then the project will happen. If you don't like the idea, just don't give your money. If you are worried this attitude becomes a trend then be active and release your stuff differently.
    • dailyllama 15y ago
      All the biggest open-source contributors I know made many of their contributions while collecting a paycheck. That doesn't make the work less valuable. I kicked in a few bucks to the project because just earlier today I wanted to run a small sintra project and had to be walked through a complicated toolchain installation that wasted time and caused frustration. Here's to hoping he can make it legitimately simple again!
    • rbarooah 15y ago
      "I myself struggle with the concept of asking $25k to build what he wants to build." Are you of the opinion that people should only be paid to do things that they don't want to do?
  • philwelch 15y ago
    If Yehuda Katz' market value is too high to build this kind of thing without sponsorship, then maybe someone else can build it gratis and he can save his time and energy for paying work.
    • tptacek 15y ago
      Nobody's stopping them. Why is Yehuda Katz working for people at large somehow better than him working for giant faceless companies?
• lukeholder 15y ago
  No, the amount is a donation. Are you saying that people who donate to apache foundation dont have influence? you are living under a rock if your think that in open source money plays no part. Sure you can fork an open source project and request a pull, but if the core team disagrees with it then its all the same as the above. Kickstarter is simply a marketing technique to raise the funds from an eventual corporate sponsor I bet.
• fady 15y ago
  well said. when i saw the link i was confused why this would be on kickstarter...just feels odd to have software development on KS, unless there is some extenuating circumstances..
  • tptacek 15y ago
    This right here is why you generally want to reconsider building products for the kinds of technical people that haunt message boards.
• toast76 15y ago
  This is something that would be personally valuable for me. He could just as easily build this and sell it on the App Store; I'd buy it too. Instead I'll donate so you can get it for free. Who says OSS has to be all about altruism and self-sacrifice? Btw.. http://railsinstaller.org/ http://railsinstaller.org/ was funded by EngineYard... I'm not sure I see the difference?
  • aaronblohowiak 15y ago
    railsinstaller is windows only.
    • toast76 15y ago
      I meant "not sure I understand why people didn't get their knickers in a twist with railsinstaller" :)
• eaurouge 15y ago
  Just chiming in to say that Yehuda Katz has given away so many work hours to Ruby, Rails and JavaScript projects - Thor being one of my favorites. If he decides to raise $25K to work on some open source project, he's more than earned the right to do so. Another point worth making is this: let the market decide. If the market will bear $25K (one-time payment) for a Rails.app, then so be it. Your opinion doesn't matter, frankly neither does mine. I don't really see this affecting open source projects either. You've always been able to make money from free (as in beer) open source projects (directly or indirectly), even for projects that are not widely used.
• eob 15y ago
  Patronage is a model that has existed as long as artists. You wouldn't be able to go see Michaelangelo's work without this model. But people have, and do, paint for free, too. I don't see why it's a bad thing that in modern times, skilled and famous artists continue to do work for hire. The fact that Yehuda is asking for crowd funding instead of funding from an individual is just in the details.
• sanderjd 15y ago
  This is such an intriguing comment. I thought you were standing on reasonably logical ground (even if I disagree) until this part: < I see it [and contribute to it] for large-scale art projects ...What in the world is the difference? If anything it makes more sense to fund work that is actually useful than work that is simply beautiful or interesting.
  • deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
• jacobian 15y ago
  Let me get this straight: so a prolific, proven open source contributor makes some money, and the community gets a problem fixed. This is a bad thing? Who loses here? What if Yehuda's company gave him 25% of his time to work on open source - would that be different? He'd get that same $25k (or whatever), and the software would get built (and open sourced). Only difference I can see is the source of the money, so are you against the idea of companies letting their devs work on open source? There's this attitude in the open source world that somehow developers getting directly paid for open source is evil. This is -- excuse me -- fucking bullshit. I can't think of anything better than the idea of developers getting paid to write open source software. We need to grow the hell up and understand that paying developers to write open sourced software is a good thing -- open source devs get money, and the community gets software. Again, who loses? I don't use Rails, and I probably never will, yet I kicked in some money to help see this through. I can think of about a million worse ways I could have spent that cash.
  • wycats 15y ago
    Thank you. That is really nice :D
  • tzumby 15y ago
    The problem here is the ego, you have to notice how Yehuda put an accent on how important his contributions to rails 3 were. I'm not arguing they're not, but as Plato put it, when you think you reached the absolute wisdom you couldnt be further from it
    • jacobian 15y ago
      Oh, I see. So the problem isn't that Yehuda's asking for money, but that he had the temerity to state his qualifications. Again, we gotta grow up. Yehuda's contributions to Rails 3 were important. What's wrong with taking credit for that? I'm often critical of the Rails community for an excess of ego, but this is not one of those cases. It seems pretty clear that the idea of an open source developer asking for money seems vaguely filthy to a bunch of people. I think this is unhealthy and poisonous. It condemns open source to be the provence of academics, the unemployed, those able to snatch free time away from their friends and familier, or those working at the largess of their corporate employers. That's a shitty limit on the scope of free software.
• swah 15y ago
  But isn't this "unused" money in the system that folks are happy to give away for increasing the probability that something they need gets done?
• patio11 15y ago
  A lot of programmers have hangups about money. Consider whether you do as well, and if so whether this is something you've purposefully chosen because you really like what it does for your life or whether it is just accidental. If it is accidental, you may want to consider stopping. a) $25k is not a lot of money for very well-known programmers. There are fairly straightforward methods to get that much in a month (a salaried job), a week (contracting+), or a day (training event, $500 a head). + Stipulate that in addition to Rails he has at least one talent which makes money and this is not unreasonable at all. b) There was no time at which OSS was not predominantly the work product of the global rich employed at corporations. This is observably true for Rails, since the list of contributors since DHH extracted it is both public and short. The Rails core team works on Rails like it is their job because... c) ... Rails was designed to, and succeeds at, making companies great piles of money by increasing the efficiency at which they can churn out CRUD apps. Please note that is in no way a criticism. Apps running on Rails go from BCC (five figures a year) to Basecamp (eight figures a year and will probably hit nine eventually unless they already did). d) OSS developers making money by it - I.e. The traditional accepted way to write it - does not make you personally worse off, because it increases software available to you. You may perceive that people will listen to you less because monied interests will drown out your voice. This is irrational: since the $100 you think is a lot of money only buys maybe 30 minutes of programmer time anyhow, the opinions that mattered in OSS were already those of companies which coul actually pay salaries, and someone freer with their last $100 than you are will only have epsilon more impact on "the community" than you when compared to IBM (a consulting company which staffed most Linux development) or Google (an advertising company which directly or indirectly pays the salaries of the majority of programmers working on either of the two big OSS browsers.) apache's Kickstarter was IBM realizing that they'd happily pay a billion dollars to have IIS not become the dominant server platform so they proceeded to do so.
  • oinksoft 15y ago
    a) $25k is not a lot of money for very well-known programmers. What if Linus said, "I have this great idea for a version control system, but I need the community to raise $100k to make it happen"? Of course he would never do that. The reason for making git was to give the kernel project what it needed for a version control system. Linus' time is at least an order of magnitude more valuable than Yahuda Katz' time. Just as git arguably makes the kernel project more successful, rails.app ought to make Rails more popular. Wide deployment of Linux in turn makes Linux developers' skills more valuable, just as wider deployment of Rails enriches Ruby developers. c) ... Rails was designed to, and succeeds at, making companies great piles of money d) OSS developers making money by it That can be said for just about any popular open source project used in the business world.
• route66 15y ago
  Hmmm ... Romanticism at work? As far as I can remember open source always has been a sponsored or subsidized undertaking as far as it concerns meaningful or central projects. Without it, the linux kernel would be only teaching material on Finnish universities, MySQL would not exist, Erlang would be a Danish mathematician and a waiting cue formula. The basis for the ASF is the web server which was developed at the NCSA. So you're on the right track with the "Can you imagine..." question. Whats wrong with someone who want to make a meaningful addition to OS and asks money to be able to give full attention to the project? Isn't that more realistic than to hope for loosely coordinated efforts of spare time developers? [note: I use this term not to criticize the persons in question but to point at the focus of the contribution. Also scratching-own-itch projects can easily err on the wrong side of the pareto ratio]
• rbarooah 15y ago
  I fail to understand why some programmers don't like to see other programmers get paid directly for their efforts. If open source work is not paid for directly, it is paid for by corporations. Even when people do work in their 'spare time', it is being subsidized by the corporate job that puts food on their table. Arguing against directly funded open-source is tantamount to arguing that developers should only be able to make a living working for a corporation. There's nothing wrong with choosing to work for corporations, but what's wrong with having alternative economic mechanisms as well?
• cfeduke 15y ago
  There's a lot of "you don't want someone to get paid for their work" replies to this comment. But the OP has a really good point: > [$100 gets you] access to the internal list for the project, where I'll be soliciting feedback about how to nail this. Great open source projects rarely come from the ideas of just one person, and your input will guarantee that Rails 4 is as great for beginners as it is for experienced developers. That is a non-starter. This is also not a $25,000 project. I admire and am thankful for Yahuda's contributions and I'd have no problem funding a "Yahuda should get paid" Kickstarter but this particular project is lame.