I described a lot of the funding for Julia infrastructure in this talk:
It’s specifically titled “Building a product which improves open source sustainability” because it details this strategy of funding open source through commercial ventures built on the open source tools.
I’ll stress that it’s not all of it of course, but it covers the Julia Lab, JuliaHub, and related entities and walks through the stories of their evolving funding mechanisms. One of the main things that is stressed is that, continually as we have been growing, Julia has had more of its core contributions being funded through commercial entities, in particular PumasAI and the JuliaHub work around JuliaSim (soon to be renamed and launched… details to come soon 
). This was done already because the uncertainty around federal funding has always existed, it’s now just testing everyone.
Now this talk was given 3 months ago, so things have clearly changed and become more uncertain, but it gives us a window into the potential opportunities and the pathways to go. Increasingly, we cannot rely on large NSF or NIH grants to fund a large MIT Julia Lab that builds the next generation of open source maintainers. We will still be going for whatever good funding mechanisms exist (in particular, the NSF CSSI grants have always been a good fit), but with these agencies cutting their budget by 50%, we should effectively assume that the Julia Lab is going to shrink by 50%.
That said, there are now more opportunities in terms of SBIR/STTR mechanisms, so increasingly one of the mindsets that I want to be fostering is helping late-stage students and postdocs enter an entrepreneurial mindset and use funding resources that require a path to commercialization. One such project is Neuroblox, which for a few years was an MIT/Harvard/Stonybrook collaboration but is now increasingly looking to perform this transition and is looking for grant pathways with DARPA/ARPA-H/SBIR/STTR and a path to commercialization of the use in the pharmaceutical and device industry. Some of the efforts around cardiac modeling is taking a similar path.
In fact, we are rather fortunate that the core business of JuliaHub has been to build a platform that is the perfect environment for bring Julia code into regulated industries: it is a SOC2, HIPPA, and CFR Part 11 compliant platform that makes so that applications written with a “good enough” software development lifecycle (SDLC) satisfies the regulatory constraints for being used in pharmaceutical contexts, and increasingly we’re covering aspects for things like automotive and aerospace. So this X+JuliaHub partnership is then a strong path quickly getting some traction in regulated industries with scientific needs that gives us a new playbook that isn’t reliant on continued government support.
Now I have to say, I obviously love open source. I can guarantee that I have written more open source software than the vast majority of people who will ever read this post. But I think we can use the learnings from Pumas, where at first I had wavered in the idea of it going commercial, but now it very clearly is a strong and sustainable funding entity which has hired many of the top contributors to the open source Julia ecosystem and has given them a day job which extends their work. It has been a success not just in building a company but also as a model for open source sustainability that has a positive mindset: people hired there understand they will now be building a product, but it’s built on open source tools they contribute to and thus a bit of both continues and we all understand where the money comes from in order to keep the bricks on the bottom standing.
Now you are seeing that for example some of the motives that are driving the major advancements of Julia v1.12 as the needs in order for JuliaSim to be put together. A lot of the work on making small binaries for Julia to ship on embedded platforms has stemmed from commercial needs where the hands that have made these contributions are parts of the teams related to shipping a product for industrial modeling and simulation with a feature for code generation to real-world devices. There will always be questions of “what should be open sourced and what shouldn’t in order to have a viable business model?”, but hopefully this showcases that it does not need to be binary thinking.
Call to Action
So let me end with a call to action. If you are needing to seek a new path to funding and would consider transitioning from academia to industry as a new way to sustain your Julia contributions, feel free to get in touch. There are many models that could work. We could partner on SBIR/STTR grants, build partnerships through JuliaHub, or just talk about commercialization models since we now have quite some experience building up commercial software products built on open source. We are talking with people doing not just pharmaceutical related things but also domains like power systems and autonomous flight. I’m happy to get creative and find new pathways.
Final Thoughts
I want to end by showing how to look at the world in a positive mindset. But there’s so much opportunity if you keep an open mindset. Take this FDA memo for example:
Some people have said it’s reckless: we need animal testing but we kind of need it right now! Instead it says we should:
- Advanced Computer Simulations: The roadmap encourages developers to leverage computer modeling and artificial intelligence to predict a drug’s behavior. For example, software models could simulate how a monoclonal antibody distributes through the human body and reliably predict side effects based on this distribution as well as the drug’s molecular composition. We believe this will drastically reduce the need for animal trials.
It’s asking for everyone to use a software that doesn’t always exist! It’s pushing the requirements to have everyone use a software that doesn’t currently exist… let’s make it?