[ANN] Ruby Mendicant Post-Mortem

[Gregory Brown]

Hi folks,

I finally did a writeup complete with acknowledgments about the Ruby
Mendicant Project, the grass roots effort where 70 individual donors
along with Ruby Central, Inc. and MountainWest RubyConf made it
possible for me to take 22 weeks off of work to hack on open source
projects. This is the reason why my PDF generation library Prawn
exists today, and it was a fun and challenging experiment.

This is mainly for nostalgia's sake, as well as to provide a
historical account of the project, but I've written a post-mortem
giving some background, explaining what got done, some of the
challenges we've run into, and what to look for in the future of
Prawn. You can see this (longish) writeup at:

http://majesticseacreature.com/mendicant/

I tried to be concise and failed, but it's a big complicated topic and
I'm sure I left things out. I'm happy to answer any questions people
may have on this thread, if people want to know more.

I also gave a talk about Ruby Mendicant at RubyConf, and put up a page
with materials about that:
http://majesticseacreature.com/talks/rubyconf08.html

I'll link to the confreaks talk on that page when it becomes available.

Thank you so much to those who supported this project!

-greg

 

[Antonin Amand]

Nice work Greg, I didn't had a look at the library yet but I like the
concept of the project itself since the beginning.

I'm dissapointed that their was no more companies to put some money on
the table for this.
Their is more an more companies that use Ruby out there and they'd
propably save time and improve their services if they had a complete
and stable PDF lib. Maybe the next time someone plegde for a project
like this one, it would be a good idea to ask company to fund it.
Maybe you did but it didn't worked ?

I wish the story of funded open sources project is just beginning.

Antonin

 

[Gregory Brown]

Nice work Greg, I didn't had a look at the library yet but I like the
concept of the project itself since the beginning.

I'm dissapointed that their was no more companies to put some money on
the table for this.
Their is more an more companies that use Ruby out there and they'd
propably save time and improve their services if they had a complete
and stable PDF lib. Maybe the next time someone plegde for a project
like this one, it would be a good idea to ask company to fund it.
Maybe you did but it didn't worked ?

I didn't ask for funding, because I didn't have a particular project
set before I accepted donations, and also didn't want to feel like I
was working for a particular person or company, as the problem was
(and still pretty much is) too general.

That having been said, if any company wants to hire me part time to
work on Prawn, doing a project here or there for them as part of the
deal, they should contact me.

I wish the story of funded open sources project is just beginning.

Me too. There are all sorts of different ways funded free software
can happen, this is just one of them. But I'd love to see more people
getting dedicated time to work on open source without having to burn
the candle at both ends.

-greg