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Open source is not about you  ↦

Strong, but important words coming from Clojure’s creator, Rich Hickey:

The only people entitled to say how open source ‘ought’ to work are people who run projects, and the scope of their entitlement extends only to their own projects.

Just because someone open sources something does not imply they owe the world a change in their status, focus and effort, e.g. from inventor to community manager.

And…

Open source is a licensing and delivery mechanism, period. It means you get the source for software and the right to use and modify it. All social impositions associated with it, including the idea of ‘community-driven-development’ are part of a recently-invented mythology with little basis in how things actually work, a mythology that embodies, cult-like, both a lack of support for diversity in the ways things can work and a pervasive sense of communal entitlement.

There’s a lot more said, and undoubtedly some tension in the Clojure community that he’s responding to, but I’m not privy to it so I won’t read between the lines.


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