Another important question to ask is: if you're not using clojure, is there a clojure-specific reason for that? (ie. "I would use clojure but...")
In my case: I reported a bug in the clojure.contrib XML library, on the google group. It's a trivial fix, but not worth the hassle of signing a contributor agreement. So although I'd fixed it myself, I couldn't send a patch. All I could do was report it - and the report was ignored.
Some time later, I reported another, deeper bug that I didn't know how to begin fixing (but did know a workaround for). It got ignored too.
I like the language, and I'm not going to say my experience was typical of the community. I spent some time hanging out on the group and the people there seemed friendly and helpful. But that's one reason I no longer use it. (Another reason is "no reason at all", and I don't know the relative weights of these reasons.)
This feels a little like whining to me, but feedback should be both positive and negative.
It's not just you. Requiring copyright assignment is a powerful way to put the brakes on community involvement by itself, but couple that with a policy of "nothing gets applied until the BDFL personally approves it" and things can get frustrating. I've had bugs with perfectly viable patches linger in the issue tracker for 3-4 months before getting applied. In some cases the original author of the library even personally approved the patch, but it still had to wait for the thumbs up.
Hopefully this will improve with the creation of the Clojure/core group. Having every commit need to be approved by a single person is absolutely unsustainable in the long run, and we're definitely already at to the point where it's causing issues.
That said, it certainly doesn't stop me from using Clojure every day; it just makes me prefer decentralization (using 3rd-party libraries rather than contrib, for example) where possible.
I should add that having Rich review every single commit is very appropriate for some parts of Clojure: I wouldn't want people committing to the STM mechanism or to the implementation of clojure.lang.PersistentVector without his approval. And for a long time Clojure almost entirely consisted of this kind of code--stuff that's really hard to get right.
But now it's had more more pedestrian nuts-and-bolts kind of libraries added like clojure.test and clojure.main. These are included out of necessity, but they are very easy to understand and fairly easy to patch and improve as well. It would be reasonable if the original authors were allowed to improve them and accept patches from the community for them even after they've been promoted from contrib.
I went back through the mailing list and think I have found the issues you are referring to here. I have asked Chouser for feedback on the XML issue, and have responded to the "deeper" question myself (http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/...) Let me know (preferably on email) if I found the right ones, and if the answer is satisfactory.
I'm not using Clojure, because I get enough Lispy goodness on the Java platform from the Kawa Scheme compiler already. I haven't been motivated to do anything real with Clojure yet.
In my case: I reported a bug in the clojure.contrib XML library, on the google group. It's a trivial fix, but not worth the hassle of signing a contributor agreement. So although I'd fixed it myself, I couldn't send a patch. All I could do was report it - and the report was ignored.
Some time later, I reported another, deeper bug that I didn't know how to begin fixing (but did know a workaround for). It got ignored too.
I like the language, and I'm not going to say my experience was typical of the community. I spent some time hanging out on the group and the people there seemed friendly and helpful. But that's one reason I no longer use it. (Another reason is "no reason at all", and I don't know the relative weights of these reasons.)
This feels a little like whining to me, but feedback should be both positive and negative.