Agreed, TFA is a good example of how to write down expectations explicitly.
But as far as dinging Hickey for the fact that he eventually needed to write bluntly? I'm not feeling that at all. Some folks feel that open-source teams owe them free work. No amount of explanation will change many of those folks' minds. They understand the arguments. They just don't agree.
> he eventually needed to write bluntly
Is there a history of that here? Were there earlier clear statements of expectations (like CONTRIBUTING.md) that expressed the same expectations, but in a straightforward way, that people just willfully disregarded?
I don't mean to "ding" anybody, I mostly just felt bad that things had gotten to the point where the author was so frustrated. I completely agree that project owners have the right to set whatever terms they want, and should not suffer grief for standing by those terms.
> Is there a history of that here?
I have been maintaining not-super-successful open source projects, and I've had to deal with entitled jerks. Every. Single. Time. I am totally convinced that any successful open source project sees a lot more of that.
> Were there earlier clear statements of expectations (like CONTRIBUTING.md) that expressed the same expectations, but in a straightforward way, that people just willfully disregarded?
IMO it's not needed. I don't have to clearly state expectations: I open source my code, you're entitled to exactly what the licence says. The CONTRIBUTING.md is more some kind of documentation, trying to avoid having to repeat the same thing for each contribution. But I don't think anyone would write "we commit to providing free support and free work someone asks for it" in there :-).
I don't remember the exact situation, but I think this relates to this:
Clojure core was sent a set of patches that were supposed to improve performance of immutable data structures but were provided without much consideration of the bigger picture or over optimized for a specific use case.
There's a Reddit thread which provides a bit more detail so excuse me if I got some of it wrong: https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/a01hu2/the_current...
*Edit* - actually this a better summary: https://old.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/a0pjq9/rich_hickey...
Dissatisfaction n. 3 is the essence of the problem: "Because Clojure is a language and other people's jobs and lives depend on it, the project no longer feels like someone's personal project which invites a more democratic contribution process". This is a common, and modern, feeling that the more users a certain thing has, the more the creators/maintainers have a duty to treat it as a "commons or public infrastructure" and give the users a vote on how the thing is to be managed and developed. This is, of course, utter horsesh*t.