[dhh]

I think you're forgetting that Rails was created for free, in my spare time, while I was being paid $30/hour working for 37signals and other US clients on a variety of projects.

But that's even besides the point. Companies letting their employees use company time contributing to OSS has been great. As the first sentence of the article points to, I'm talking about projects raising money directly from the community.

[larrys]

"First of all, it's tempting to cash in on goodwill earned."

The way I see it what you have done is way better.

And this strategy is really what people should be doing as opposed to simply cashing in goodwill:

"Take Ruby on Rails. More than 3,000 people have committed man-decades, maybe even man-centuries, of work for free. Buying all that effort at market rates would have been hundreds of millions of dollars. Who would have been able to afford funding that?"

Work for free that has benefited many people including you. Can't put a price on that.

You created Ruby on Rails and it was like well enough that all those people "more than 3000 ... man-decades ..." have put their time into the project and you have benefited greatly because you are the person that most people associate with Rails. Not any of the 3000 contributors. And that notoriety is what pays off in droves. Even if you passed up a few dollars (debatable by your argument?) you've gotten something way more valuable.

[equalarrow]

I don't think dhh would argue that he has made a nice bank roll on Rails - no one would. But he isn't the only one that's benefited. There are quite a few of the 3000 committers that have their own consulting companies and they do quite well. Many speak at conferences, write books, etc. This is all pretty standard in the OS community and nothing new to Rails or dhh.

I think what he's taking aim at more is that he did this for free of charge and did not require any fundraising campaign to get it off the ground (or continue it). And it's the other freedom (in his case, libre) that allowed him to do whatever he wanted, on whatever whim he wanted. There was no hard deadline (except those he made) imposed because of funding constraints. And from that perspective, he's absolutely right: not beholden to anyone else's money or rules is the ultimate freedom to be as creative as you want to make whatever you want.

Because it's possible now to get a project funded on something like Kickstarter, there's less freedom when that happens because money becomes the ultimate driver. If it wasn't, then there'd be no need for it and work on the project could take any form over any timeframe.

[hacknat]

My point is that this is, in and of itself, fundraising.

Edit

Also, I don't want to minimize the effort it took for you to create Rails, build momentum behind it, and get other people excited about it. What if Kickstarter, et al is just a new medium to help empower other people to do what you did?

[adambard]

Nobody would have contributed to an unproven web framework written in a then-obscure language.

Two recent OS fundraising successes I can think of are funding for further development of Typed Clojure, and the integration/rewrite of South into Django core. Both projects were in production use when they raised the money!

Imagine today, someone pitching to build a new async web framework in Livescript. "Why not Ember/Meteor/Angular!?" "Why not Javascript?!". It could be that someone comes up with a truly killer framework by utilizing Livescript's features the way DHH did with Ruby and Rails, and if they did I'd happily use it, but I wouldn't put my money on it today.

[PeterisP]

There are a lot of things that people are willing to do for free, but they wouldn't be willing to do it for a dollar - say, helping someone change his car tire.

There is a psychological difference - if you transfer the mindset from 'helping out' to 'work for hire', then suddenly you have to pay "enough" (which will be a huge amount for many projects) or you'll get less stuff done than you'd get for free.

[kordless]

Based on his comment, my imoression is that David wrote Rails because he neeeed Rails for the job, not because a client needed Rails written for them. There's a difference between those two things.