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Comment by darksaints | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure there is some good in there to have some solid funding for additional development, but now that it's a commercial venture, I'm terrified to see the revenue model. The moment you build your profit platform on top of someone else's profit platform, you become someone else's servant.

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These kind of concerns are not unreasonable in general of course, but in this case let me point out that Julia Computing has been a commercial enterprise for more than six years. Also, our commerical product is deliberately not Julia, but rather we're building our products on top of Julia, just like anyone else might. In fact there are several startups unrelated to us that have built multimillion dollar businesses entirely in Julia . At this point there's a bunch of companies that depend on Julia and are committed to it's future - we're just one among them.

You're not just one among them given how much control you have over the language itself. Those other companies aren't founded by the co-creators of and main contributors to the language.

Sure, but there's two separate concerns here. One is that money will turn us evil and we'll exercise undue influence. My counterpoint was that JC has been around for six years now and in that time we've actually strengthened Julia significantly as an independent project. My other point though was about concentration risk. I think far more common than people turning evil is that companies go all out raising money, become the only people developing a project and then if the revenue doesn't come as planned, the company and the project fail together with unpleasant results. At this point, if Julia Computing fails, Julia the language will survive no problem. Of course we're not planning on failing, but before going out on this commercial path, it was hugely important for all of us that Julia is on solid footing. For must of us, what we've built in Julia is our "life's work" (ok, it's only been 10 years, but that's a substantial effort still) and we're not planning to let that just die.

JetBrains is doing pretty well. They created Kotlin. Kotlin is quite popular.

Nothing has changed here. Julia Computing has always been a commercial venture — that's its reason-for-being, providing enterprise support and products built on the language. The Julia Language has always been (and always will be) open source. The two are completely separate[1], but we at Julia Computing invest greatly in the language itself — our success as a company is directly linked to the language's success.

1. https://julialang.org/blog/2019/02/julia-entities/#julia_com...

This is my concern too. I skimmed the article and I guess its going to be something along the lines of locking certain sim modules behind a subscription like Autodesk/Fusion360?

Happy to be wrong here.

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