A lot of programmers have hangups about money. Consider whether you do as well, and if so whether this is something you've purposefully chosen because you really like what it does for your life or whether it is just accidental. If it is accidental, you may want to consider stopping.
a) $25k is not a lot of money for very well-known programmers. There are fairly straightforward methods to get that much in a month (a salaried job), a week (contracting+), or a day (training event, $500 a head).
+ Stipulate that in addition to Rails he has at least one talent which makes money and this is not unreasonable at all.
b) There was no time at which OSS was not predominantly the work product of the global rich employed at corporations. This is observably true for Rails, since the list of contributors since DHH extracted it is both public and short. The Rails core team works on Rails like it is their job because...
c) ... Rails was designed to, and succeeds at, making companies great piles of money by increasing the efficiency at which they can churn out CRUD apps. Please note that is in no way a criticism. Apps running on Rails go from BCC (five figures a year) to Basecamp (eight figures a year and will probably hit nine eventually unless they already did).
d) OSS developers making money by it - I.e. The traditional accepted way to write it - does not make you personally worse off, because it increases software available to you. You may perceive that people will listen to you less because monied interests will drown out your voice. This is irrational: since the $100 you think is a lot of money only buys maybe 30 minutes of programmer time anyhow, the opinions that mattered in OSS were already those of companies which coul actually pay salaries, and someone freer with their last $100 than you are will only have epsilon more impact on "the community" than you when compared to IBM (a consulting company which staffed most Linux development) or Google (an advertising company which directly or indirectly pays the salaries of the majority of programmers working on either of the two big OSS browsers.) apache's Kickstarter was IBM realizing that they'd happily pay a billion dollars to have IIS not become the dominant server platform so they proceeded to do so.
a) $25k is not a lot of money for very well-known programmers.
What if Linus said, "I have this great idea for a version control system, but I need the community to raise $100k to make it happen"? Of course he would never do that. The reason for making git was to give the kernel project what it needed for a version control system. Linus' time is at least an order of magnitude more valuable than Yahuda Katz' time. Just as git arguably makes the kernel project more successful, rails.app ought to make Rails more popular. Wide deployment of Linux in turn makes Linux developers' skills more valuable, just as wider deployment of Rails enriches Ruby developers.
c) ... Rails was designed to, and succeeds at, making companies great piles of money
d) OSS developers making money by it
That can be said for just about any popular open source project used in the business world.
Why? Maybe he was paid by the linux foundation during that time? Other sources of income? The gratuit "of course" is not clear to me.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you try to say, but:
" rails.app ought to make Rails more popular [...] wider deployment of Rails enriches Ruby developers". Are you saying that Yehuda should not make money from his efforts, but the Ruby developers in turn can use the results naturally for their gain?
Why? Maybe he was paid by the linux foundation during that time? Other sources of income? The gratuit "of course" is not clear to me.
And Rails is sponsored by 37Signals. You'd be hard pressed to find very many large open source projects without commercial backing.
Are you saying that Yehuda should not make money from his efforts, but the Ruby developers in turn can use the results naturally for their gain?
That is generally how things work. Companies specializing in open source technologies have a business interest in their specialty software(s) becoming more popular. A core Rails developer will command the highest speaking and consulting fees.
I think the reservation many people have about all of this is that it feels backwards. Asking for sponsors is one thing, but making the open source project pay-to-play flies in the face of the spirit of FLOSS.
What is "FLOSS"? Free/Open Source software? The fact that you can't even refer to it without an acronym that conflates two opposed philosophies suggests that maybe the "spirit of FLOSS" is less well-defined than you think it is.
In any event, it is better than Katz should work directly for people who are going to use his software than that he work for some giant company that incidentally finds it valuable to task him with something useful.
At the same time I do not get how this is a problem for people to accept wrt software, while it is the common suggestion to artists in copyright questions on HN: go crowdfunding!
a) $25k is not a lot of money for very well-known programmers. There are fairly straightforward methods to get that much in a month (a salaried job), a week (contracting+), or a day (training event, $500 a head).
+ Stipulate that in addition to Rails he has at least one talent which makes money and this is not unreasonable at all.
b) There was no time at which OSS was not predominantly the work product of the global rich employed at corporations. This is observably true for Rails, since the list of contributors since DHH extracted it is both public and short. The Rails core team works on Rails like it is their job because...
c) ... Rails was designed to, and succeeds at, making companies great piles of money by increasing the efficiency at which they can churn out CRUD apps. Please note that is in no way a criticism. Apps running on Rails go from BCC (five figures a year) to Basecamp (eight figures a year and will probably hit nine eventually unless they already did).
d) OSS developers making money by it - I.e. The traditional accepted way to write it - does not make you personally worse off, because it increases software available to you. You may perceive that people will listen to you less because monied interests will drown out your voice. This is irrational: since the $100 you think is a lot of money only buys maybe 30 minutes of programmer time anyhow, the opinions that mattered in OSS were already those of companies which coul actually pay salaries, and someone freer with their last $100 than you are will only have epsilon more impact on "the community" than you when compared to IBM (a consulting company which staffed most Linux development) or Google (an advertising company which directly or indirectly pays the salaries of the majority of programmers working on either of the two big OSS browsers.) apache's Kickstarter was IBM realizing that they'd happily pay a billion dollars to have IIS not become the dominant server platform so they proceeded to do so.