It's not helping clojure grow as much as it could though and it's a bit a chicken/egg problem, more clojure users could be more datomic users and vis-versa.
I would only make a closed-source solution a centerpiece of my business if:
* The thing is known to work for a number of other people, and uniquely solves my urgent problem, while no open solution can't do anything comparable. This is probably the Datomic niche.
* The thing was around for ages, and is a cash cow of a major and reliable software maker, and is also significantly better than open software in some important area. This is how MS or IBM sell their databases; Datomic doesn't have nearly enough mindshare to compete here.
* I'm hastily building an MVP that I plan to scrap anyway when the growth hits / the startup is acquired. Datomic is likely too expensive for that.
By necessity, the first case holds for a small number of businesses.
I've been considering trying to get up to speed with Mentat[0], which is a Mozilla project to create a Datomic-like layer over SQLite for desktop applications, and help out with that or even try to start a full open source clone of Datomic, though probably won't happen for a good while due to real life happening.
It's got so many good ideas and it sucks to see them go to waste in a proprietary database where basically nobody gets to use them.
What if it's unobviously not possible?
edit: found it https://soundcloud.com/defn-771544745/23-the-right-honourabl...