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Here we go again. We've got companies building skytowers using the steel and concrete we fund with bake sales. Our most important open source projects are depen

Here we go again. We've got companies building skytowers using the steel and concrete we fund with bake sales. Our most important open source projects are dependent on corporate philanthropy that can disappear overnight. We can debate the merits of RVM/chruby/rbenv yet all agree that open source version management projects are essential infrastructure for Ruby. Sure, we're grateful that EY funded RVM (and other projects) for so long. But what now? I contributed $50 to the RVM Bountysource campaign.But a one-shot charitable fundraiser is a slim reed on which to sustain a project like this. Tens of thousands of developers use RVM. And the companies they work for spend millions to develop businesses that could not be be built without the infrastructure provided by open source projects such as RVM. It's skytowers funded by bake sales.

rurounijones 13y ago
Welp there are people trying to address this, https://www.gittip.com/ https://www.gittip.com/ for instance.
- benatkin 13y ago
  Gittip is chump change. The amount of money raised so far for rvm's current crowdfunding is about the amount that the top receiver on Gittip might get in 20 weeks. https://www.gittip.com/ https://www.gittip.com/ You say Gittip is trying. That's true, but I think they slipped into a slow growth pattern months ago. At its current rate it would take years for it to be a viable way of funding more than a handful of open source hackers.
  - rurounijones 13y ago
    > The amount of money raised so far for rvm's current crowdfunding is about the amount that the top receiver on Gittip might get in 20 weeks. https://www.gittip.com/ https://www.gittip.com/ That is not a technical problem, that is a social one. The OP said > But a one-shot charitable fundraiser is a slim reed on which to sustain a project like this. And he is correct, the gittip style is probably better for long-term but faces problems as you pointed out, although again, I do not think any of them are technical in nature. (Probably the biggest problem being the complete lack of companies on gittip et al and the feeble amounts, in terms of companies' budgets anyway.)
    - benatkin 13y ago
      This supports my point. My point is that Gittip is irrelevant and there's no reason to believe it will become relevant. If it were a technical problem and yet had reached its current level of success, I would think that if they fixed their technical problems, it might become relevant. Since it's a non-technical problem (social problem, positioning problem), how to fix it is unknown. The quickest path would very likely involve tearing the whole thing down and starting over again.
regularfry 13y ago
I think RVM's played out. We can see the problems that approach comes with, so now we can move on to better things that don't have such high maintenance costs. That's the question we should be asking - why should a tool like this need funding to this extent?

rurounijones 13y ago

Welp there are people trying to address this, https://www.gittip.com/ https://www.gittip.com/ for instance.

benatkin 13y ago
Gittip is chump change. The amount of money raised so far for rvm's current crowdfunding is about the amount that the top receiver on Gittip might get in 20 weeks. https://www.gittip.com/ https://www.gittip.com/ You say Gittip is trying. That's true, but I think they slipped into a slow growth pattern months ago. At its current rate it would take years for it to be a viable way of funding more than a handful of open source hackers.
- rurounijones 13y ago
  > The amount of money raised so far for rvm's current crowdfunding is about the amount that the top receiver on Gittip might get in 20 weeks. https://www.gittip.com/ https://www.gittip.com/ That is not a technical problem, that is a social one. The OP said > But a one-shot charitable fundraiser is a slim reed on which to sustain a project like this. And he is correct, the gittip style is probably better for long-term but faces problems as you pointed out, although again, I do not think any of them are technical in nature. (Probably the biggest problem being the complete lack of companies on gittip et al and the feeble amounts, in terms of companies' budgets anyway.)
  - benatkin 13y ago
    This supports my point. My point is that Gittip is irrelevant and there's no reason to believe it will become relevant. If it were a technical problem and yet had reached its current level of success, I would think that if they fixed their technical problems, it might become relevant. Since it's a non-technical problem (social problem, positioning problem), how to fix it is unknown. The quickest path would very likely involve tearing the whole thing down and starting over again.

regularfry 13y ago

I think RVM's played out. We can see the problems that approach comes with, so now we can move on to better things that don't have such high maintenance costs. That's the question we should be asking - why should a tool like this need funding to this extent?