On Community Funding of Open Source

drbrain | Fri, 30 Mar 2012 02:49:42 GMT

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The other day Yehuda Katz announced a kickstarter for creating Rails.app, an OS X application that makes it easy to bring new programmers to Rails and Ruby.

I think the idea is fantastic. When I first started learning Ruby I had to do battle with compilers, RubyGems didn't exist, the RAA had but a handful of libraries, and there weren't really even any tutorials for learning Ruby around. I had either fortitude or stubbornness on my side to get through the much steeper learning curve than many of you had to deal with to get where I am today, and it sucked.

I think the idea of soliciting community for funding is fantastic. It's not the first time a Rubyist has solicited money to work on open source. I funded Gregory Brown's work on Prawn a few years ago and was happy to do so even though I've never used Prawn (although I'd like to someday) I was incredibly happy to support it. I'll probably never use Rails.app, either, but that doesn't mean I'm not happy to support it, nor that Rubyists are wrong to support it.

Now, to get to my point, I don't understand why I keep seeing such negative feedback around Yehuda's choice of soliciting money to bring us Rails.app. Sure, it may just be a few of you, but if you don't want to give Yehuda money, fine, just don't. If you think Yehuda is asking for too much money, fine, just don't donate. If you just don't like Yehuda, fine, just don't donate.

But stop with the personal attacks, even the snarky ones and the jokes at Yehuda's expense.

You would not find it so funny if people were ganging up on you.

This is a fantastic idea Yehuda has presented and if he had the ability he would bring it to us for free. Right now he doesn't have that ability so he's asking for our help.

Being a major contributor to open source is incredibly difficult. While thousands or even millions of people may be happily using your software, you mostly hear from the people who are having problems with it, especially after they're extremely frustrated. Throwing insults atop this is incredibly demotivating and depressing, so cut it out.

If want to continue to complain, whinge or make cruel jokes, towards Yehuda or any other Rubyist, why not take that effort and put it towards something positive. Do something that is welcoming to new Rubyists like improving some ruby documentation, submitting a bug report or submitting a patch to fix a bug.

Stop making our community look like a bunch of jerks. It's fine if you disagree with another Rubyist, especially one who has contributed so heavily to Ruby, but you should have enough respect for them to be polite. comments

Comments RSS FEED

I don’t necessarily agree that it’s as useful as it’s cracked up to be, but I absolutely agree with you that personal attacks are not only unnecessary, they’re actively detrimental. It is apparent that about (last I checked) $37,000 worth of people are interested in seeing this thing made, so there it is, it does the rest of us no harm.

For my part, I don’t think I’d ever use it, or instruct anyone too — in my opinion, ruby is one of the easiest languages to get set up with. There are a fantastic suite of tools that are readily available, each with a very clear scope, each with excellent documentation (both official (in the sense it was written by the developers proper), and community-written), and each with a reasonably straightforward API. Yes, it does present a learning curve, but so does programming in general; and frankly, if you’re not interested in getting your hands dirty and really learning how real rails apps are built, then perhaps you should reconsider your choices.

That said, I think this may fit a niche of, “I want to test this out, so I download this and then write my little prototype.”

I guess my only issue with it is that it seems sort of trivial — slap a GUI on the rvm install commands, the homebrew install commands, and write some nice READMEs, but I’m also a bit biased.

TL;DR Totally agree — we should all remember, MINASWAN.

jfredett said 29 minutes later

There already is an RVM GUI that’s being actively maintained. http://unfiniti.com/software/mac/jewelrybox

Rails Installer, http://railsinstaller.org, which provides this jumpstart for Windows users is also in progress for OS X as well as Linux.

Remear said about 1 hour later

I set up many laptops for RailsBridge, I think it could be easier. Half the group could have set their machines up themselves, but the other half would have become too frustrated. Ultimately, this group wanted to learn Rails, so why burden them with packages and compiling?

Sure, it’s something they should will need to learn eventually, but it is a distraction from learning Rails (and Ruby) so I’m willing to give them a break. I’m sure we’ll get more Rubyists if we go from easy to hard than if we go from hard to easy.

Eric Hodel said about 4 hours later

C’mon guys. An virtual machine image with preinstalled environment would do the trick. But would do this on OSX because installing Rails env isn’t that hard as everybody (and Yehuda) is considering. Yes it was pain but now it’s not.

$25k for another way of installing the same thing, even if You are encouraged to learn “normal” way as well. L.O.L.

But everybody can pay for anything so :)

Rucksell said about 8 hours later

I mean nobody is doing this on OSX

Rucksell said about 8 hours later

Another thing: every excuse for doing this project starts with: “When I first started learning Ruby I had to do battle with compilers, RubyGems didn’t exist”. But we not live in this times anymore? Right?

Rucksell said about 14 hours later

Remember that your needs aren’t the same as an absolute beginner’s needs, nor are they the same as an intermediate user’s needs that is more interested in exploring Ruby or Rails than they are at learning how to install all the individual components.

Much like a Ruby release frees you of the need to install autotools and bison and rvm frees you of the need to install zlib, OpenSSL, curses, etc., and Rails.app will free users from the need to install a compiler, rvm, etc.

Eric Hodel said about 14 hours later

Always easier to be a destructor than a builder anyway, eh?

Props to Yehuda for tackling problems when he could be sitting on his a*s talking smack about people trying to make the Ruby ecosystem a better place for everyone.

I only wish more Kickstarter projects could be created to fund research and development on topics like client-side Javascript MVC frameworks integration to Rails (Ember or Backbone) and even more so for anything dealing with concurrency/asynchronous Rails and related drivers.

Bertrand Chardon said about 14 hours later

I guess I’ll never use it too but it’s a great way giving something back for all the amazing work yehuda has done so far FOR FREE!

Jakob said about 14 hours later

What Jakob said is perfect. I probably won’t use rails.app, but thanks to Yehuda’s hard work (along with the work of many other generous people), I have a good job as a Rails developer, and my life is happy.

valerie said about 14 hours later

Perfectly stated. Thanks for saying what I’ve been wanting to say, better than I could.

Avdi Grimm said about 15 hours later

You’re correct that Yehuda doesn’t deserve nastinesss, but that shouldn’t mean the idea/crowd-funding process is beyond criticism. I had more than a comment’s worth to add, so ended up writing a blog post in response: http://alexbcoles.com/code/2012/04/02/crowd-control.html

Alex Coles said 3 days later

Discussion, disagreement and criticism are important, even critical to the health and livelihood of any community. When you skip criticism and continue to jokes and personal attacks you end up harming the community.

Yehuda and I don’t agree on everything, but when we have a disagreement I do my best to treat his (or any other person’s) position with respect. I try to focus on what I feel is wrong the the issue, not the person behind it, and avoid personal attacks.

Eric Hodel said 3 days later

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