(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.)
It gets pretty tiring on HN/reddit to watch people demand so much shit for free, namely other people's time. If you've ever run a project with users (most people haven't), you've experienced these demands first-hand.
It's nice to read these sorts of posts when it's getting you down.
For me it was the recent outrage at Elm's creator. Random people on HN/reddit basically acting like they were some disgruntled paying customer. You can see a common thread with Rich's defense of Clojure.
Associated Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/a0lalh/timothy_and...
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.
You are not entitled to make money off it, just like you aren't entitled to make money off that open source project you forked.
> Open source is a no-strings-attached gift
> Morale erosion amongst creators is a real thing.
It reminds me of a project called aurman [1] (a great AUR-Client for Arch Linux). Due to the 'feedback' from the community, the main author went from loving to work on his project to hating it. In the end, he stopped the public development to protect himself from the negativity.
The free software movement, however, says things like this (from https://www.debian.org/social_contract ):
Our priorities are our users and free software.
We will be guided by the needs of our users and the free software community. We will place their interests first in our priorities.
We will give back to the free software community.
In other words, free software is about you.
I would quibble with the claim that the open-source process is what produced Clojure in the first place. The open source movement has benefited from sailing in the same direction as the free software movement and using the same tailwinds. Without the free software ethos (which was behind GNU as well as a lot of the Lisp work at MIT), would Clojure have been able to stand on the same shoulders, and would it have attracted the community of users and the ecosystem of libraries it has?
Nope. It's a derivative work, and, as such, requires the permission of the people who own the copyright and trademarks.
> You are not entitled to make money off it
This matters less than you may think. There's a four-part test [1], and profit is considered, but the work not being for-profit doesn't make the work legal.
[1] https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#107
Here's an old-ish article I like to link to, on Waxy.org, called "No Copyright Intended":
https://waxy.org/2011/12/no_copyright_intended/
> Under current copyright law, nearly every cover song on YouTube is technically illegal. Every fan-made music video, every mashup album, every supercut, every fanfic story? Quite probably illegal, though largely untested in court.
By all means, read the whole thing.
Here's a lawyer's take on it:
https://www.traverselegal.com/blog/can-derivative-works-be-c...
> Image yourself an artist (of any sort) who has drawn such great inspiration from another (copyrighted) work that you would like to modify that work to create something new. Are you allowed to do so? Could you get a copyright to your new creation? As with most questions in law, the answer is: it depends.
> “A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship” (17 U.S.C. § 101) is called a Derivative Work. The original copyright owner typically has exclusive rights to “prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work” (17 U.S.C. § 106(2)). It is considered copyright infringement to make or sell derivative works without permission from the original owner, which is where licenses typically come into play.
Again... make or sell. Not making a profit off the work doesn't necessarily protect you.
Whether you are entitled to write fanfic is not a straightforward case. As https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_issues_with_fan_fiction documents, some authors allow it, some don't, and fanfic sites pay close attention to who does. The fact that you can write Star Wars fanfic is not entitled under law, it is entitled by implicit or explicit permission from the copyright holder. Star Wars is OK. Pern? Not so much.
Oh, and sometimes you can both write and sell fanfic legally, no matter what the copyright holder thinks. For a famous example, Bored of the Rings is legal because it is marked as parody.
Moving on to open source, you are even more squarely wrong. The definition of open source, as found at https://opensource.org/osd-annotated, in item #6 says that commercial use must be allowed. In other words anyone is free to try to make money off of that open source project they forked as long as they follow the license.
In fact the term "open source" was invented as part of a marketing campaign to encourage the use of free software for commercial purposes. Far from "you can't make money from this", the whole intent was to encourage people to try to make money from it. And seeing that you could, to encourage businesses to make more of it! (This marketing campaign was successful, which is why you both have heard of the term some 20 years later, and everyone uses open source software.)
Now the license may restrict what business models are feasible. For example you can't edit GPL software then sell it as proprietary. But that is a MAY, not a MUST. As an example, selling relabeled BSD software commercially is both explicitly allowed and occasionally encouraged.
If you don't understand this, then you don't understand the open source movement. See https://opensource.org/osd-annotated for a basic primer.
It is, however, the case that open source under the GPL is a perfectly well-defined concept, as is free software under the MIT license. The terms refer to worldviews about the code and ethical obligations, not to licenses.
GPLv3 Section 6 d: "Convey the object code by offering access from a designated place (gratis or for a charge), and offer equivalent access to the Corresponding Source in the same way through the same place at no further charge. You need not require recipients to copy the Corresponding Source along with the object code."
Please keep nasty internet tropes like that one way, far away from Hacker News. If you'd review the guidelines and follow them from now on, we'd appreciate it.
Well, defun is a macro: http://clhs.lisp.se/Body/m_defun.htm
The parenthesized prefix notation is advantageous because it is unambiguous and easy to format. People trained on infix still make mistakes due to associativity and precedence: mistakes in understanding an expression and in writing the correct expression which matches their intent. Their skill does not translate into unfamiliar languages that have unfamiliar operators with unfamiliar precedence and associativity rules.
The user of a Lisp benefits from the development which has gone into the language/implementation. That development is lubricated by the structure of the code. The Lisp programmer does not only write new macros, but uses existing ones, either in the language/implementation or third party libraries.
There is no problem you cannot possibly solve with defun (plus escape hatches to access any aspect of the host environment), because defun gives you access to a Turing -complete computation model.
This is simply not a genuinely honest way to evaluate tools. Gee, I'm not convinced that there is a text editing problem I can't possibly solve with ed if I bash at the keyboard long enough; so for now I will keep sitting on the fence.
possibly isn't easily, efficiently, maintainably, and so on.
So this is not some grieving random person from crowd - Chas is a person whose libraries and contributions I value tremendously and he certainly made LOTS of contributions to clojure OSS landscape for free and out of his good will as well. So ultimately this feels like your parents are arguing (which is never a good thing) - you like them both and you just want the arguing to stop and you just want everybody to live together in harmony. But here you go, Chas has moved away from clojure now. And I have to say I am very sorry to see him go.
> As a user of something open source you are not thereby entitled to anything at all. You are not entitled to contribute. You are not entitled to features. You are not entitled to the attention of others. You are not entitled to having value attached to your complaints. You are not entitled to this explanation.
Also see my response on the gist itself:
https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba95...
Feel free to use my HN comment as an upvote/downvote proxy since gist doesn't support upthumbs/downthumbs on comments.
Remember .. cigarettes? Arsenic Wallpaper and cloth[3]? Radium cosmetics [4]? Toasty warm Radium blankets[5]? Shoe fitting x-ray fluouroscopes[6]? Lead water pipes[7]? Sugar? Guns? non-fire resistant household furniture? Dinitrophenol[8]? Asbestos? Leaded petrol? CFCs? Unsafe buildings? Bisphenol-A? BSE related beef? 3D printers and their carcinogenic particle side effects[9]? Trans fats[10]?
and then why we have things like the CE marking safety standard in Europe. On and on, products are harmful by default until government steps in and forces manufacturers to make them safe(r). The free market cares about profit, not people.
What's next, people who make products are responsible for making them safe?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat_belt_legislation
[2] https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/federal-legislat...
[3] https://hyperallergic.com/329747/death-by-wallpaper-alluring...
[4] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/objects-of-intrigue-lo...
[5] https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/364732/view/radium-blanke...
[6] https://gizmodo.com/the-insane-cancer-machines-that-used-to-...
[7] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2509614/
[8] https://www.theguardian.com/science/the-h-word/2014/feb/06/d...
[9] http://blog.ichibanelectronic.com/3d-printers/3d-printers-ca...
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans_fat#Public_response_and_...
"At first, each community is defined by its potential. But as that potential is realized, the community begins to be defined by its compromises. That change is felt most keenly by the people who were there first, who remember what it was like when anything seemed possible. They feel fenced in and so they move on, in search of their golden city."
"Never, ever, ever give a talk about a library or other code publicly unless it's in a public repo prior to the talk. Period. (Exceptions to this might be things like case studies and such.) Doing otherwise is surely irritating to talk attendees, but it's even more disrespectful towards organizers, as their acceptance of your talk may have been implicitly preconditioned on the attendees being able to benefit from the code/library/project in question."
Is the expectation now that when you talk about something it is necessarily going to be open source? (And from there the expectations grow and grow...)
"All social impositions associated with it, including the idea of 'community-driven-development' are part of a recently-invented mythology..."
Reminds me of Margaret Thatcher saying "There's nos such thing as society." https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/apr/08/margaret-th...
Now if only they can get someone to keep repeating it, it'll be true.
https://github.com/dominictarr/event-stream/issues/116
Edit: it attempts to steal crypto-currency; it doesn't mine it.
> Something that is often very hard to understand (it took me years to do so). Is that maintaining a language is insanely hard. Everything has a cost. Let me give a good example: A few years back someone submitted a patch that improved the error messages in Clojure. Worked great, just a single extra "if" and a message. It was committed to master. Then people's code got way slower. Why? Well this was a often used function and that single if blew the JVM inline budget causing that function to never be inlined. And that improvement had to he yanked out.
This is just fact. You can go read the license to learn more about this: https://opensource.org/licenses/eclipse-1.0.php
That part of what Rich is saying is pretty much indisputable.
The second part, is related to what is best for Clojure. And the argument is simple, Rich says what is best for Clojure is a thorough review process of all changes to its core and standard libs, with a very high bar towards contributors and their contribution. His argument is that this has worked so far, and has created the solid piece of software that is Clojure today. Thus its own success is proof that it is a good enough process and is good for Clojure.
The argument against is that contributors find it too hard and too much work and thus very little contributors make it through the process. Though I didn't really see them mention any alternative process suggestion. It seems they were mostly wanted their patch to just be merged in without challenge.
The far more important and long-reaching gestures would be: expressions of thanks, and standing up for creators whenever unwarranted demands are made upon them.