(Downvoters: Did I read his essay incorrectly? The reddit post from 1 year ago and the github post today seem be the same theme of managing the community expectations of Cognitec.)
Rich put it well that Clojure is not closed, it is conservative. He made it to solve the problems he encountered in the industry, which were large multithreaded proprietary systems. It is a business first language (cognitect is a consultancy, after all). The fact that so many hobbyists like me ended up using it was kind of a happy accident.
These two audiences don't have completely opposed interests, but they do have different priorities. Businesses care about stability; they don't care much about whether the language accepts PRs on Github or conducts twitter polls. I accepted that a long time ago, and I'm still using it six years later.
Ok, I see the possible confusion. I wasn't trying to say they were related to the same event. I was trying to point out they were related themes.
When I read today's post, I had an immediate sense of déjà vu. No wonder, he used the word "entitlement" repeatedly in both posts a year apart. (Counted 11 times in today's post and 4 times in October 2017.) He also mentioned personal sacrifices of losing money on Clojure in both posts. (The "retirement money" in today's post and "$200k" in last year's post.)
I don't follow Clojure closely but the meta question/observation is that there seems to be a profoundly broken misunderstanding and recurring pattern of negative interaction between the Clojure community and Cognitec that causes Rich Hickey to express his frustration in way that other folks Ruby's Matz, Rust's Hoare, didn't have to express. (Maybe Hoare left years before the Rust community could turn on him and accuse Mozilla of holding back progress in the language (and therefore Rich's predicament is inevitable if one stays involved long enough) -- I dunno.)
Yes, different specific triggers but the same type of frustrated response. I thought they were over a year apart but you're saying the frustrations are unleashed every couple of months so that's news to me.
In turn, it's in the interest of Heroku/Google/Dropbox/Mozilla to build a genuine free-software community around the language, to pass off as much important stuff to volunteers who seem like they're building good things, to let other people have a seat at the table for language design, to give a commit bit to people who work for other companies. As far as I can tell, that's not the case for Cognitect, which is why this post makes it sound like supporting the community is a thing done out of the goodness of Cognitect's heart, that the fact that less than 1% of Clojure users are Cognitect customers is bad, and that Hickey could just take the money into his retirement account. These other companies can't just take the money - they would lose money if the community dried up.