Well, unless you think $300k sets you up for life and unless they could get a revenue stream going, it's going to run out and be back in the hands of volunteers no matter what.
This line of questioning (or accusation) is a good example of the phenomenon where people often expect a disproportional amount of your future time because they once gave you a one-time quantity of money, or possibly by pointing to money that other people gave you.
Look at it another way: $300k got us Light Table which was a pretty cool editor. I used it to help people get started with Clojure and I didn't pay them a dime. It didn't get us eternal paid support and maintenance, though. How could it? It also unfortunately never developed the ecosystem around it like Atom and VS Code were able to, so now it's here trying to find maintainers.
Also, pretty much all editors are dependent on volunteers to create plugins and ecosystem, even ones you directly pay money for like Sublime.
Money was raised for purpose of hiring two specific developer but this sum of the money would be gone even if you hired two developer from east europe.
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This is kinda off topic, but how on earth did the team who took 300,000$ for light table end up foisting it off on volunteers?
Well, unless you think $300k sets you up for life and unless they could get a revenue stream going, it's going to run out and be back in the hands of volunteers no matter what.
This line of questioning (or accusation) is a good example of the phenomenon where people often expect a disproportional amount of your future time because they once gave you a one-time quantity of money, or possibly by pointing to money that other people gave you.
Look at it another way: $300k got us Light Table which was a pretty cool editor. I used it to help people get started with Clojure and I didn't pay them a dime. It didn't get us eternal paid support and maintenance, though. How could it? It also unfortunately never developed the ecosystem around it like Atom and VS Code were able to, so now it's here trying to find maintainers.
Also, pretty much all editors are dependent on volunteers to create plugins and ecosystem, even ones you directly pay money for like Sublime.
so now it's here trying to find maintainers
and it found one
this issue discusses the transition:
https://github.com/LightTable/LightTable/issues/2383
That was 6 years ago.
What does that have to do with anything?
It is not very big sum of money.
300000$/6years = 50000$ yearly
For this money you can hire around 0.5 developer.
Or 2-3 developers in southern EU.
Money was raised for purpose of hiring two specific developer but this sum of the money would be gone even if you hired two developer from east europe.