A lot of people ask, what does JuliaHub do and what does this mean for open source? We took the time to detail how JuliaHub is a commercial entity that produces products like Dyad, but importantly how this connects to and strengthens the open source community. I think this deeper discussion of open source sustainability models is a deep topic that we need to discuss from time to time, so I hope you enjoy!
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I watched the OSA Community event video a week ago (and skimmed this article now). The point about standards/certification made a lot of sense, and the part about managing maintanence in an academic setting - with student maintainers (hopefully) graduating and moving away - resonated a lot having seen the difficulties of that firsthand.
(btw, small typo: the first header is “Introduct” instead of “Introduction”)
One fundamental thesis here is that the FOSS parts make up the building blocks for the commercial side of things, and so it makes commercial sense to continue work on them and improve them.
This employment model creates a virtuous cycle: pharmaceutical companies pay for specialized domain expertise and regulatory-compliant tools, which funds the continued development of the open source foundations that enable even better tools in the future.
Which makes sense generally, but foundations vs specialized domain expertise often isn’t a black and white distinction. Taking the points under “Addressing Real Industrial Requirements” as a rough guide for the scope of Dyad
- “Strict code generation requirements meeting [aerospace] standards” and “Drag-and-drop model development for engineers” fall clearly in the commercial domain-specialized side
- “Validated library of engineering models” is slightly further in the spectrum but still largely in the specialized side
- “Accessible SciML capabilities” and “Handling complex real-world scenarios” are much less clear cut, and I can see there being a lot of ambiguity about whether certain functionality and code belong in the FOSS side of things or on the commercial end.
So how do you see JuliaHub resolving this kind of ambiguity moving forward - are there (or will there be) any internal processes or guidelines to decide what is in scope for Dyad vs what goes into the FOSS ecosystem? The argument that Dyad benefits from the open source core makes sense, but beyond that core, the incentive is for ease-of-use developments (“Accessible SciML”) and rich complex features (“Handling complex real-world scenarios”) to go into Dyad instead of the FOSS side of things. How do you draw the cut-off line so that Dyad remains sustainable without sacrificing the future ease-of-use improvements and richness of the FOSS ecosystem?
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