Comment by jwr

6 hours ago

If you use Clojure for your business, please consider funding this effort and also directly developers who work on software that you use. It makes for a sustainable ecosystem.

The Clojure community is very mature and incredibly nice, so things are not bad as they are, but they could definitely be better.

I try to set aside a portion of my business revenue (I call it a "sustainability fee" in my P&L) and spread it among the authors of libraries that I use. It's not much for each author, but if everybody did this, many authors could work on open source libraries full time.

what needs funding is clojure core, Clojurists Together is a nice effort to try to fill a gap but what my business needs, and other business owners tell me they need, is for the core language (clojure and clojurescript) to not feel like it is falling apart. I want to invest my money in targeted, specific high value problems and get leverage on my money by sharing the cost with other business owners who need the same issues fixed. Until such a vector exists, the next best thing (for my business) is to fund a few key maintainers directly via github sponsorship. But because it is indirect and not outcomes-driven, the money amounts will be smaller. My business can afford to invest more than the $2400 per year that we have been donating since the release of Electric. My business has employed 4 devs for 5+ years, I can find more budget for investments in Clojure. Businesses pay for things (unlike individuals). We want to pay. We want our key dependencies to thrive. But there is no vector to invest in the specific core issues that would benefit my business to improve. And this makes me sad because over the last few years I find myself leaning more and more away from Clojure, even repelled (as if by some invisible force), instead of leaning in.