[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.