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Comment by idunning | Hacker News Reader

I'd say that the actual news is that the Julia founders have found a way to make a living through consulting, enabling them to keep working on an free (in both senses) software. They've also managed to scale to bring on some large contributors too, which is even better. There are three choices, as I see it:

- They would have had to go work for another company that doesn't care about Julia. Its now a free time project.

- They would have had to go work for another company that does care about Julia. They get to work a bit on Julia, but focus shifts to what this company cares about.

- They work for themselves.

Not quite sure why this isn't a more common situation for open-source, it seems like the ideal situation for everyone.

I work on Julia, not for pay, and something like this only encourages me as it is a strong signal of demand by Real People writing Real Code.

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> Not quite sure why this isn't a more common situation for open-source, it seems like the ideal situation for everyone.

Because it's hard to do. I've been trying to figure out how to do it too for a while, but first of all you gotta wrangle a bunch of developers, a large part of which don't actually want to have any actual responsibility with the project. Many of even the most core developers see it as a hobby.

Then, finding customers isn't easy. It's not just a matter of putting a "Support And Consultancy For Sale" sign on your webpage. You gotta have a nice website, and you have to go and convince people that their money is well spent. And you have to make sure you have the proper infrastructure to handle those requests.

And once you find customers, you have to figure out how to spend that money. As the root of all evil, it can lead to tensions between developers. What used to be just for fun is now a job. This may actually demotivate them. And they might now have to concentrate on tasks that pay instead of tasks that are merely fun. And they might resent how the money gets distributed.

All of these problems can be surmounted, of course, but it's not at all easy, and it involves a set of skills most free hackers don't have. We'd rather be coding than running a business.

idunning this is very well articulated. We are completely committed to open source, and working for ourselves just is so much better.

As for JuliaBox, we are grateful to AWS for the credits. They rescued us once, but going forward, we have to figure out a way to make it self-sustaining. I feel it is reasonable to have some level of sustainable free JuliaBox access, with charges for higher compute and storage - kind of like github, although it is not an apples to apples comparison.

Is the startup going to follow in the footsteps of Enthought ?

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