# Ruby Mendicant Post-Mortem

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-mendicant-post-mortem/153317>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [November 14, 2008, 7:21pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-mendicant-post-mortem/153317 "2008-11-14T19:21:04Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![naething](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/n/e47774/32.png) [@naething](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/naething)\
**Post date:** [November 14, 2008, 7:21pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-mendicant-post-mortem/153317/1 "2008-11-14T19:21:04Z")

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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/](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](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

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**Author:** ![naething](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/n/e47774/32.png) [@naething](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/naething)\
**Post date:** [November 15, 2008, 11:52am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-mendicant-post-mortem/153317/2 "2008-11-15T11:52:57Z")

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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

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**Author:** ![naething](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/n/e47774/32.png) [@naething](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/naething)\
**Post date:** [November 15, 2008, 9:16pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-mendicant-post-mortem/153317/3 "2008-11-15T21:16:48Z")

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On Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 5:49 AM, Antonin A. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid)  
wrote:

> 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