Julia definitely can and does use various sources of funding:
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Donations to support Julia are handled by NumFOCUS, which deals with all of the legal and tax aspects of running a non-profit: Sponsored Projects | pandas, NumPy, Matplotlib, Jupyter, + more - NumFOCUS … small donations are welcome too!
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Julia Computing (http://juliacomputing.com/) provides commercial Julia support and development, and employs many of the key Julia developers.
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Several Julia people are in academia, and can use a portion of their grant funding to support Julia development.
That being said, if anyone has personal deep-pocketed contacts who might be interested in substantially funding Julia development, it would be extremely helpful if they could cultivate that possibility. Probably the best way to handle it would be through NumFOCUS.