Comment by geofft

I think it's also true that Cognitect is invested in the direction of Clojure in a way that Matz's employer (Heroku), van Rossum's employer (Dropbox, before that Google), and Hoare's employer (Mozilla) are not. Cognitect is doing commercial support for Clojure, and sells the closed-source database Datomic. Heroku, Dropbox, Google, and Mozilla merely want to see Ruby/Python/Rust succeed. They're not consulting for / commercially supporting other people who use those languages, and while they desire to see their own use cases supported, the community understands they have no fundamental conflict of interest (which is often more important than whether they have a conflict of interest themselves).

In turn, it's in the interest of Heroku/Google/Dropbox/Mozilla to build a genuine free-software community around the language, to pass off as much important stuff to volunteers who seem like they're building good things, to let other people have a seat at the table for language design, to give a commit bit to people who work for other companies. As far as I can tell, that's not the case for Cognitect, which is why this post makes it sound like supporting the community is a thing done out of the goodness of Cognitect's heart, that the fact that less than 1% of Clojure users are Cognitect customers is bad, and that Hickey could just take the money into his retirement account. These other companies can't just take the money - they would lose money if the community dried up.