# Julia's business model

**URL:** https://discourse.julialang.org/t/julias-business-model/70328
**Category:** Community
**Tags:** question, licenses, legal
**Created:** [October 25, 2021, 11:31am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/julias-business-model/70328 "2021-10-25T11:31:37Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 88

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### Author: ![jzr](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/eb9ed0/32.png) [@jzr](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/jzr)
#### Post date: [November 6, 2021, 7:33pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/julias-business-model/70328/88 "2021-11-06T19:33:45Z")

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> [@StefanKarpinski](#):
>
> Do you trust megacorps more for some reason? I doubt it. Instead, I suspect it’s because you trust the individuals in charge of those projects to not be unduly influenced, regardless of their employer.

Everybody wants Julia to be successful and for its developers to be successful, and I’m sure the JC team are well-intended and capable technologists. But for me, my concerns are mainly not a matter of trusting those individuals. When investing in a foundational technology, I don’t want to rely on a single company. Incentives stemming from Julia Computing’s [$28.6M](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/julia-computing) investor obligations are only a small part of the risk—any single company would have some incentive structure that is not perfectly aligned with the broader community’s.

It is useful to consider two kinds of projects: those that are principally controlled by a single company, and those with distributed control.

**Python** is managed by the Python Steering Council, chosen by election from the core developers, and the nonprofit Python Software Foundation (PSF). It has been led by a distributed group of core contributors including van Rossum for a long time. “Python” and “PyCon” are [trademarks](https://www.python.org/psf/trademarks/) of the PSF.

**PostgreSQL** [has](https://momjian.us/main/blogs/pgblog/2020.html#October_7_2020) an “unwritten rule that the Postgres core team should not have over half of its members from a single company” and quickly [expanded](https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/new-postgresql-core-team-members-2103/) the Core Team after an acquisition merged large employers in order to resolve the issue.

**Rust** Core Team member Steve Klabnik wrote recently in a thread beginning [“I refuse to let Amazon define Rust”](https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/1437441118745071617):

> In the beginning, Rust did have one sole patron: Mozilla. Everyone was uncomfortable with that arrangement, including Mozilla.
> 
> We spent years trying to get away from this situation. It had tons of negative effects.

**Go** and **Swift** each are essentially controlled by a single company. The company’s incentives drive the direction of the language and its ecosystem. Swift is regarded as an excellent language but has little adoption outside Apple-product developers.

* * *

Looking at **Julia** ’s GitHub [contributors](https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/graphs/contributors?from=2019-12-08&to=2021-11-06&type=c) of the last two years, I count 6 of the top 10 are employees of Julia Computing. The ecosystem packages are also largely supported by Julia Computing. The “Julia” name and logo are [owned](https://trademarks.justia.com/882/45/julia-88245811.html) by Julia Computing and Stefan, respectively. In 2017, there was [discussion](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/trademark-guidelines-fair-use-policy-for-julia-name-logo/3404/4) about transferring the IP to a foundation but I haven’t seen movement on that. On the other hand, the JuliaCon [proceedings committee](https://juliacon.org/2021/committee/) isn’t a Julia Computing team.

I know Julia Computing’s contributions to the language and its ecosystem are massive, and the largest contributors perhaps unavoidably have the largest influence on the language. I don’t know in what ways the concentration of control and funding risk harming the language ecosystem as a whole, or how these risks can be avoided. But it’s worth looking for ways to mitigate such problems before they arise. I hope these discussions continue until that risk fades away.

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