Open Source Funding: Clojure

This past week, the creator of Clojure, Rich Hickey, sent out a plea for funding.
Since then, Clojure group at Google have been deluged with suggestions on how to fund open source, in general.

A number of companies "open sourced" their APIs, frameworks, SDK, etc in order to cultivate the development ecosystem around it.
This has the effect of:

1. Propelling the company's name into recognition as being a technology leader;
2. Garnering inputs and refinements from its users/contributors ecosystem;
3. Making a head start in marketing products made from the open sourced software.

Hence, the above open sourced software model is not created from the scratch, on one's weekends
but reaping result of development over several years by several paid developers.
The software thus open sourced is probably quite "mature".

The case where one starts out alone, as in Clojure, is very different. The originator probably has the master design in his/her head. As enhancement requests and bugs come in, the originator has to spend probably large amount of time to triage and prioritize them besides guiding the project thru its team of contributors. This will probably get better as more contributors/committers can step up to the plate.
The key revenue source, open sourced software, I think should be from commercialization stream.
In others words, non-commercial users can freely download and learning to use it but companies that incorporate open sourced software as component of their software release should pay for it.
After all, open sourced software encompasses some intellectual properties that most big companies protects and demanded royalties for use.

The start of a new blog journey

Today I finally begin the journey into the blogsphere which I have put off for so long.
I borrow the lines from "Walrus and Carpenter" from Lewis Carroll's narrative poem,
through his book Through the Looking-Glass, published in December 1871 to start this journey:

"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is boiling hot--
And whether pigs have wings."

The above lines from Walrus seems appropriate to launch this blog.
The next few weeks, I may blog some things about Clojure, the new JVM Functional language.

Thanks to Stephen C. Gilardi, my former colleague at Avid Technology who get me started on Clojure.