Comment by jasode
7 years ago
>Broadly yes, but I'm guessing this one was sparked by this thread
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.
I think it's also true that Cognitect is invested in the direction of Clojure in a way that Matz's employer (Heroku), van Rossum's employer (Dropbox, before that Google), and Hoare's employer (Mozilla) are not. Cognitect is doing commercial support for Clojure, and sells the closed-source database Datomic. Heroku, Dropbox, Google, and Mozilla merely want to see Ruby/Python/Rust succeed. They're not consulting for / commercially supporting other people who use those languages, and while they desire to see their own use cases supported, the community understands they have no fundamental conflict of interest (which is often more important than whether they have a conflict of interest themselves).
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.
> Maybe Hoare left years before the Rust community could turn on him and accuse Mozilla of holding back progress in the language
Yes, this is the case. (As far as I can tell.)
You're downvoted, but I think that's a bit unfair.
Graydon did leave pretty early, so there wasn't this kind of pressure yet, really. However, after he left, we moved to a "core team" model, which meant that a few people (I among them) were the decision makers for everything. This eventually lead to complaints and pressure, and we opened it up further from there, adding all the other teams.