
Julia founders commercialize language, create new startup - henk53
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/small-biz/startups/julia-founders-commercialise-language-create-new-startup/articleshow/47211869.cms
======
hurin
I don't know what the actual news is but it sounds like the article is
misrepresenting what is happening here.

Julia and JuliaBox are both MIT Licensed:
[https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/master/LICENSE.md](https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/master/LICENSE.md)
[https://github.com/JuliaLang/JuliaBox/blob/master/LICENSE.md](https://github.com/JuliaLang/JuliaBox/blob/master/LICENSE.md)

The only factual content I was able to gleen from the article was that they
plan to have a paid offering for:
[https://www.juliabox.org/](https://www.juliabox.org/) ?

~~~
idunning
I'd say that the actual news is that the Julia founders have found a way to
make a living through consulting, enabling them to keep working on an free (in
both senses) software. They've also managed to scale to bring on some large
contributors too, which is even better. There are three choices, as I see it:

\- They would have had to go work for another company that doesn't care about
Julia. Its now a free time project.

\- They would have had to go work for another company that does care about
Julia. They get to work a bit on Julia, but focus shifts to what this company
cares about.

\- They work for themselves.

Not quite sure why this isn't a more common situation for open-source, it
seems like the ideal situation for everyone.

I work on Julia, not for pay, and something like this only encourages me as it
is a strong signal of demand by Real People writing Real Code.

~~~
ViralBShah
idunning this is very well articulated. We are completely committed to open
source, and working for ourselves just is so much better.

As for JuliaBox, we are grateful to AWS for the credits. They rescued us once,
but going forward, we have to figure out a way to make it self-sustaining. I
feel it is reasonable to have some level of sustainable free JuliaBox access,
with charges for higher compute and storage - kind of like github, although it
is not an apples to apples comparison.

~~~
enupten
Is the startup going to follow in the footsteps of Enthought ?

------
ssivark
TL;DR: "They have launched a startup, Julia Computing, to provide services
such as support, training and consulting services for Julia, for a fee."

Basically, consulting and services. For all those who're getting worried by
this, I don't think there's any inherent problem. After all, this is exactly
what Red Hat has been doing with Linux for years.

~~~
krick
Honestly, I still feel a bit uncomfortable when hearing about something like
that. When a company (especially if it's a company making a software product
for "internal" use, like programming language or monitoring service) provides
"support and training for a fee" I cannot help but imagine how all the
documentation disappears or becomes more and more outdated, until only
enterprise customers are using that stuff. Because if you are paid for
training, why would you care to teach people for free, right?

Of course it's probably only my imagination, but… that's it.

~~~
ViralBShah
Yes, certainly imagination. :-)

The documentation is community created and under the MIT license as is the
rest of the code. Our customers like Julia because it is a high quality open
source project. Our incentives are fully aligned to make Julia the best open
source project it can be, in all aspects.

I did not work on Julia for the last 5 years to see it become cripple-ware. I
have worked in a startup before where all the amazing engineering work
disappeared. That is why we started Julia in the first place.

------
vegabook
This seems a little hasty on the part of the Julia guys. This is a promising
language and I for one was looking closely for alternatives to Python. Yet
Julia hasn't built enough traction yet, and here we are with a commercial arm
run by _all_ the founders, already. There is of course nothing wrong with
wishing to monetize one's hard work, but I fear that the OSS community will
now shun Julia because they'll be afraid that new features might be added only
to some commercial version in the future, and/or, the incentives of the
founders will be to make it hard not to pay for consulting. We've seen this
before ("Open"gamma, I'm looking at you).

If this were some cloud service with an "enterprise" version I'd be less
worried, but when we're talking about breaking into scientific computing
against a very entrenched Python/Numpy, and rising candidate Lua, not to
mention R, you're going to need as much goodwill as possible from the
scientific and academic communities who are so crucial to growing an
ecosystem, and many of these are hostile to commerce.

Perhaps the siren song of Matlab's high pricing still sings for Edelman.

~~~
pen2l
I don't know about Matlab... I heard they had a big layoff just recently. So I
suspect they might shake things up and make Matlab cheaper.

That said, I recently went from Python to Matlab for the work that I do, I
wish I had done it sooner. Documentation is much better, support is nice, and
folks in my lab are good at Matlab so I can get quick good help. Bottom line
is I get stuff done with Matlab much faster and with better results. YMMV.

~~~
vegabook
That is a decent counterpoint to my original comment I think. I work with
clients who are very happy and very productive with Matlab, precisely for the
reason you cite: fantastic docs and support. I just cannot justify the huge
spend on every new module, nor is Matlab an option if you want to distribute
software widely. Also my sense is that the somewhat more chaotic world of
Numpy is more innovative, if less stable and user friendly.

But I definitely think there is a strong case for high cashflow when it comes
to supporting a technology. Perhaps this might be good for Julia if (and only
if) they can keep the OSS people motivated and onside.

~~~
kejaed
I'm curious why you consider Matlab not an option to distribute software
widely? They have the Matlab Compiler that allows you produce executables that
work with the freely downloadable Matlab Compiler Runtime.

I know of at least one software product, Imatest, that is produced and
distributed this way.

[http://www.mathworks.com/products/compiler/](http://www.mathworks.com/products/compiler/)

[http://www.imatest.com](http://www.imatest.com)

~~~
vegabook
I am given to understand that some functionality is not compilable or
redistributable. I work in a fairly specialized field (fixed income term
structure optimization) and this page is not encouraging (see "cannot be
compiled" column):

[http://uk.mathworks.com/products/compiler/supported/compiler...](http://uk.mathworks.com/products/compiler/supported/compiler_support.html)

Also, finance is a field ripe for disruption, and if you're going to disrupt,
you probably don't want to be doing it by relying on an expensive piece of
highly proprietary technology, is my view.

~~~
kejaed
Ah yes, great point.

I suppose that ties into the whole trade off one has in using Matlab in the
first place: locking in to a proprietary commerical product to spend more time
on problem-space work and less on managing memory and I/O etc. You get to pay
up front to get working on your problem more quickly, and you pay again later
on with a potential lack of flexibility.

I have been burned by such a lock in before in a personal project where the
commerical make an app easily SDK was discontinued and left in the dust with
all the developers left holding their collective unupdateabale apps in their
hands.

------
rrock
Great news. The core developers had said that this was in the works at last
years JuliaCon. Now they can make a living through consulting while continuing
to work on Julia.

------
artnep
Julia is an extremely ambitious project -- more so than most other languages
being developed now, due to the number of things they're trying to do, and the
novelty of Julia relative to previous projects. I used Julia for a couple of
toy projects, but I then started running into various odd bugs in the language
and libraries, so I stopped using it.

It's great news for me that they're starting a company, and the core
developers will have the opportunity to step up development as part of their
livelihood. I hope they hire some full-time developers to iron out all of the
kinks.

------
jordigh
Hm, how did they get the initial funding? I want to do the same thing for
Octave, for which I'm sure a similar market exists, but I have no idea where
to get the money to get started. This isn't a startup that just grows
indefinitely. It's not a build once, sell infinitely often kind of thing. Each
contract requires constant labour and upkeep.

So how did they manage to attract a hedge fund? And are they losing any
autonomy in that? Also, will this distract them by making them work on
customer-specific software and installations instead of working on Julia
itself?

~~~
RockyMcNuts
yeah... raises a lot of questions, did they blog somewhere about what they're
doing? which hedge fund? how is it going to help/change evolution of the
platform?

~~~
otoburb
Does it matter which hedge fund? According to the article, the hedge fund
offered them a contract for what seems like an open-ended engagement while
simultaneously encouraging the core developers to go out and raise funds.
Seems like Julia Computing partners decided not to raise funds and instead are
trying to bootstrap themselves as per the article quote:

"The startup is currently completely bootstrapped and has about a dozen
employees including the founders, with no immediate plans for raising funds."

The term "startup", probably chosen by the publication and not by the
consulting practice partners, is definitely confusing. However, since Shah
also discussed potential products that the LLC would be trying to
commercialize, the choice of words and resultant confusion is understandable.

Stefan Karpinski lists himself as a founding partner as of 2013[1], so the
idea has clearly been percolating in the back of the core developer team's
heads for a while, and rightly so since how else can they sustain the
development of the language full-time?

[1] [http://karpinski.org/resume/](http://karpinski.org/resume/)

~~~
ViralBShah
Yup, Julia Computing has been around for all of last year, and it has been
publicly known, but perhaps not widely, as I gather from the comments here. We
talked about it at JuliaCon 2014. See:
[http://juliacon.org/2014/](http://juliacon.org/2014/)

The terms are used a bit loosely. Commercial support is what I think of as a
scalable product, which is different from consulting and training, which are
services we provide.

Having Julia Computing has meant that we can do Julia for a living, helping
our customers who also love Julia. A win-win!

~~~
RockyMcNuts
If the 'NY hedge fund' can be publicly named / give an endorsement, it would
drive adoption in other hedge funds and financial applications. It's a pretty
small universe and surely one thing holding back adoption is confidence that
it's production-ready, availability of a pool of people who use it, etc.

------
emil0r
Very misleading title. Wanted to read the article, was hit by yet another
story that wants to be a minor novel before it gets to the point, and then
skipped reading the article because... effort. Was left with the impression
that you would now have to pay for using it and only upon reading the comments
I finally get what it is they're doing.

------
jeffshek
This was hinted at Chicago's JuliaCon about some consulting work. Some of the
JuliaCon participants brought up a question - "I love Julia, etc, but how can
you convince me that this isn't going to be dumped once you guys all get
bored?" \- IIRC, Jeff Bezanson replied something along the lines of "I love
this project and I'm comfortable starving on ramen while I work on this".
Which is a noble thing for Bezanson to say, but actually made me nervous about
Julia's future.

Considering it's obvious Bezanson and many of the core contributors works on
Julia full-time * 2, I wasn't quite sure how he paid rent/food. And since
everyone needs to pay food/rent ... this seems a very good thing for the
contributors to continue working on Julia.

If you told me that the core developers were planning to eat ramen for years
on end, I'd be very worried for a new language. Instead, this strikes a great
balance for Julia to advance and keep the lights on.

------
0x09
[http://juliacomputing.com](http://juliacomputing.com)

------
hcrisp
> Second is in the embedded (devices and platforms) space ... It is almost
> ready -- so in theory, by next year, Julia could be working on the iPhone
> and Android platforms.

Regarding Julia on Android and iOS, Julia was recently ported to ARM v7 via a
Raspberry Pi 2. I wonder what the other barriers are for getting it to run on
a mobile OS?

------
vixen99
So putting a lot of time and energy into projects involving Julia is likely
problematic for the time being?

~~~
wtetzner
I don't see why, the language is still free (both as in beer and as in
freedom), they're just selling training. It's basically a consulting company.

------
doug1001
are there any material differences between Julia Computing for Julia and
TypeSafe for Scala? From my reading of the OP i didn't see any; if there are
not then i should think this is a good thing for Julia.

------
nomorejulia
And another promising new tech goes down the kermit. Shame. And writing a book
with the chap from infosys? Yikes, given what we have seen from the warm
bodies drafted in as so-called developers from infosys, that cannot be a good
sell for the book. Glad with stuck with the python numerical stack now - far
more mature.

~~~
ninjin
I honestly do not get the controversy. They work as consultants to fund
development and the start-up has been publicly known for almost a year. How is
this any different from companies hiring developers to contribute to the Linux
kernel or Google hiring van Rossum back in the day? The language is still
free, as in freedom. Am I missing something?

~~~
peatmoss
Yeah, this might offend some aesthetic sensibilities (people wanting no
corporate flavor), but the mechanics of this surely would not even offend RMS.

