I assume Rich is selling exactly this. Company XYZ wants $hard_to_implement_feature. Company gives Rich money specifically so he'll implement $hard_to_implement_feature, and then they get $hard_to_implement_feature.
An example of this was my department wanted a certain feature in the Moose library, so we offered to pay one of the developers to write it. Then it turned out we didn't actually have funding for this ("pay someone to work on free software? fuck that") and so it never happened. But for a company with it's act together, this is a great way to make your internal codebase cleaner, and you get to say, "thanks to us, everyone gets this".
Rich has said many times that he will not do this. Clojure/core might, but rich does not want clojure to be influenced by the highest bidder, essentially the same as the donations i'm guessing. Rich is an advisor to clojure/core, but his purpose is to further clojure and community interest only. Of course this is my understanding of the matter, i don't speak for him.
Well, "support" doesn't imply "creative control". I doubt a language designer would contract under terms which let companies simply pay to add to the language roadmap.
He likely would let them pay for:
* advice on how to work around the lack of their proposed language feature (as a subset of "advice on how to solve problems in or with the language").
* some influence over prioritisation of the roadmap. If there are two language features Rich was planning to add anyway, pushing one that a paying customer desperately needs up the priority list wouldn't interfere much with the creative direction of the language.
Of course they will try to influence you if you let them. You have to make it clear that development of new features (or fixes to issues for which there is no reasonable workaround) is not part of the support contract and they will be separately billed for it. This is how it works everywhere I've worked at.
I don't think you understand what I'm saying. There's no terms at all in the donation-based giving, and yet people think they have influence. Contracts get renegotiated all the time. What would prevent Company XYZ from exerting pressure along the lines of "we want you to do [abc] or we're not renewing?"
All I was originally saying was that I just feel he'll end up in the same situation. I'm not suggesting he can't say no. :)
I think the sense of entitlement from a donation is unbounded, since it was voluntary. People are usually more clear that a business transaction is thing x for money y.
If you're pointing out that people are acting irrationally, then, yes, they are. The difference is that we tend to treat "business transactions" different from other kinds - I think monetary donations are not seen as business transaction, so the expectations are different. See this excerpt from Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=8923395...
1) "Company XYZ" doesn't do anything. There are people making the decision.
2) I have run into people that will say that. It is usually a bluff.
3) In the rare cases it is not a bluff, you can either drop the business (figuring you don't want to deal with person X) or, if you think they are out-of-line take it to their superiors.
All that being said, if you aren't willing to call the bluff for whatever reason, then they do exert an influence over you. That's really your fault though. If you have backed yourself into a corner where a single contract will make-or-break you and you aren't on really good terms with the people involved you are screwed no matter what.
The main difference is that things will be much simpler and clearer. He's being paid _exactly_ so the company can say "we want [abc]". If [abc]s get too big or not important enough for Rich, he can also stop renewing the contract.
