Julia will always be open source

[Viral Shah]

Hello all,

You may have seen today’s Hacker News story about Julia Computing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9516298

As you all know, we are committed to Julia being high quality and open source.

The existence of Julia Computing was discussed a year ago at JuliaCon 2014, though we recognize that not everyone is aware. We set up Julia Computing to assist those who asked for help building Julia applications and deploying Julia in production.  We want Julia to be widely adopted by the open source community, for research in academia, and for production software in companies.  Julia Computing provides support, consulting, and training for customers, in order to help them build and deploy Julia applications.

We are committed to all the three organizations that focus on different users and use cases of Julia:

1. The open source Julia project is housed at the NumFocus Foundation. http://numfocus.org/projects/

2. Research on various aspects of Julia is anchored in Alan’s group at MIT. http://www-math.mit.edu/~edelman/research.php

3. Julia Computing works with customers who are building Julia applications. http://www.juliacomputing.com/

Our customers make Julia Computing self-funded. We are grateful that they have created full time opportunities for us to follow our passions. Open source development will never cease.

You may have questions. Please shoot them here. We will respond back with a detailed blog post.

-viral

[Steve Kelly]

Could Julia Computing be a way to sponsor the core team to do full-time development? How is it going to work when there are consulting jobs that bring in revenue, yet take time away from core development?

[Scott Jones]

I also read this article this morning: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/small-biz/startups/julia-founders-commercialise-language-create-new-startup/articleshow/47211869.cms

I had been a bit concerned, that after Wednesday, Jeff might have to go find a job out in the "real" world, and would not be able to continue doing the

great job he has been doing with making such a fine tool for me!  (I had hoped that he'd already would have a job lined up at MIT... I also know that

many MIT professors also start companies, do consulting, etc. on the side (Michael Stonebraker seems to found a new company each month!)...

Will Jeff be doing that, working in academia (at MIT or elsewhere), and at JC on the side, or working full time for Julia Computing ("real" world, in a sense, yes, but great for all of us)?  Inquiring minds want to know!

About NumFocus, I see that it is set up as a charity, with Stefan on the board of directors, which is good to see.

About your current customers, are any of them willing to come out of the closet with their love of Julia? ;-)

I'd love to hear from anybody also trying to use Julia for production software (as I'm sure they have a lot of the same issues).

Maybe there needs to be a small julia-commercial group here!.

As a consultant myself, I am particularly intrigued by the idea of earning a living using Julia full-time (I am almost doing that already, for a very innovative little startup).

I'd love to hear more details...

-Scott

[Eric Forgy]

I think this is great. Our startup has similar issues. We want to do innovative work, but that work needs funding, so we also do some consulting/training to pay the R&D bills. It can be a challenge to find the right balance though, so beware :)

Given the position of Julia Computing, another potential source of revenue for you is helping companies (like mine) with recruiting. If you kept a database of Julia developers looking for employment opportunities, firms (like mine) would be willing to pay up to 3 months salary for "finding fees". Speaking of which, do you know anyone in Hong Kong? :)

One question I have though is about how to balance open source versus proprietary development. There are currently Julia packages we're using that could use some professional development to clean up and make production worthy. If we pay developers to clean up an existing package, it feels weird to just give the work we paid for away. Any thoughts on how I should think about this? I probably just need some education and am open to suggestions. It would be interesting if Github issues could be given a $ value, i.e. "resolve this issue and receive $x in fees". This could be an effective way to prioritize :)

[Jeff Bezanson]

I will work for Julia Computing full time. I think it's unavoidable
that trying to make a living will take at least some time from working
on julia. Even in academia, there are papers, grants, classes, talks,
and so on that take time away. My current guess is that our best bet
is to have an independent, julia-focused company. Being successful
that way is the only way we can end up actually able to work on julia
full time without having to explain to anybody why we're wasting so
much time :)

[Scott Jones]

Well, I spent many years doing nothing but proprietary development... all trade secrets, etc. even though the language/database system was based on an ANSI standard language.  Now I'm consulting for a small startup, and we are also trying to balance open source vs. proprietary development.

So far, the approach that we are trying to take is as follows:  when something we need to write is of general usefulness,  such as improving string handling, database access, decimal arithmetic, performance, we'd like to contribute it back to the open source community (I've been trying the last two weeks to deal with some string issues, plus I'm hoping to collaborate with some of the other really smart people contributing to Julia, like Steve Johnson on decimal arithmetic & Jacob Quinn on the ODBC binding.

It's a win-win for us, because in some sense, it's like getting the work of other really smart people for free... (of course, it's a two-way street, hopefully we'll be able to give as good as we get...)

[Eric Forgy]

Thanks Scott. That makes a lot of sense.

[Jim Garrison]

On Saturday, May 9, 2015 at 1:20:15 PM UTC-7, Viral Shah wrote:

You may have questions. Please shoot them here. We will respond back with a detailed blog post.

Here's something I've been wondering about: juliacomputing.com mentions "security updates" as part of the commercial support package.  At this point I know of no instance (so far) in which there was a julia security advisory.  In the future, will such security advisories also be released to the public?  And if so, will the public be notified on the same time frame as companies that are paying you for support?

[Viral Shah]

Absolutely! Today, just about everything gets rolled up into a point release right now, and that will always be the case. Production users may not want to wait for a point release, and we will work out a way to apply patches and such.

As people are already working towards deploying Julia in production, such things may come up - to a lesser extent in core Julia, but more likely in the surrounding libraries.

All of this will come together as we get closer to 1.0, since a lot of people are waiting for that for serious deployment.

-viral

[Jim Garrison]

Great! I've been putting together some notes on what I think Julia's
security policy *ought* to be at this early stage (right now there is
nothing mentioned about security in the manual), and will try to draft
this soon as a pull request for discussion.

[Ken B]

I was able to "sell" Julia recently for a small 2,5 month consultancy project at a research institute. The main difficulty in convincing the client was the uncertain long term support for the language, so I'm very happy to see this Julia Computing LLC up and running. 

I agree with Scott that a list of organisations using Julia would be very valuable for further promotion. Viral, would that be possible?

Eric, I put the project online under an MIT license. The idea was that the more people use it, the more valuable it would become as it might receive issues and fixes for free. This is of course very much project dependent.

Also, I've just started at a University where I plan to promote Julia, so I hope that Julia Computing LLC will share their training material.

And finally, best of luck with the new company!

Best regards, Ken

[Tony Kelman]

I (and several others who I've spoken with in person) hope you're all able to appropriately balance time spent towards the consulting work vs time spent towards developing the core language, since those will inevitably not overlap as often as everyone would like. The progress that the language can make towards the many developments it needs depends strongly on how much time gets spent working on it.

On Saturday, May 9, 2015 at 1:20:15 PM UTC-7, Viral Shah wrote:

[Viral Shah]

That’s fantastic to hear, and thanks for the good wishes. We are using much of the already public training material for the most part right now, but we expect to refine it with every engagement, and put out something new as soon as we have something substantially better.

-viral

[Viral Shah]

This is the key question. I will echo Jeff’s sentiment here. There is no ideal job out there where one can work only on julia. Even as researchers, some of us have spent considerable amounts of time writing grant proposals for funding, reports, and such. The language needs to mature significantly, so that the user base grows, and there are enough opportunities for support and consulting (not just for ourselves, but others as well) - which can fund core work. All our customers also want the same thing.

These are still very early days. We are clear about the need to keep the core development work separate from consulting. I believe that we will see development accelerating with Jeff graduating, and all of the core team working full time on Julia for the first time.

-viral

[Charles Novaes de Santana]

Dear all,

Just to make echo in Ken's observation: I work as a postdoc in an University and I have seen many researchers that still didn't start to use Julia because they are afraid that the language development might be discontinued for any reason next few years. They say they want their research projects to be cited and used in the future, so to work in a young language without an Organization behind seems to be too be very risky to them. I am pretty sure many of them can change their mind after knowing about Julia Computing.

That said, I am happy to hear about Julia Computing! For the creators and for the language itself. Good luck and long life to Julia Computing!

Best,

Charles

--

Um axé! :)

--
Charles Novaes de Santana, PhD
http://www.imedea.uib-csic.es/~charles

[Brian Granger]

Congrats on Julia Computing stuff! We (IPython/Jupyter) are always thinking about various approaches to making open source sustainable and it is great to see explorations like this. I wish you the best of success!!!

I wanted to share some thoughts and questions about trademark as it relates to open source projects. These thoughts have come out of many years of thinking about, and even enforcing, trademarks in the context of Jupyter/IPython.

With IPython/Jupyter, the yet-to-be-filed trademarks (there is a bit of subtlety about the IPython trademark - that is another topic) will belong to our non-profit sponsor, NumFocus (we will transfer it to them). Along with that, we will be developing a trademark usage policy that clarifies to the community how our names and logos can be used. I am guessing that our policy will be similar to that of other open source projects like Python:

https://www.python.org/psf/trademarks/

It is likely that we will have a trademark policy that allows generous usage of the names IPython/Jupyter by the open source community, but we would not allow companies to use the trademarks in ways that would confuse users. A company could say "our platform uses the open source Project Jupyter" but not "our company is called JupyterFoo." IANAL, but it is my understanding that the bar for trademark confusion is relatively low and that there is a real danger to not enforcing trademarks, so these issues are important to understand.

I think you can see where this is going wrt Julia...

* Who holds the trademarks on Julia? NumFocus, an individual or Julia Computing?

* What is the trademark policy of that entity? If it doesn't exist, who will create it?

* Is Julia Computing infringing upon the Julia trademark? Has the trademark owner given permission to Julia Compute to use the trademark?

* By using the name "Julia" in the company and open source project, is the trademark owner creating a precedence of not enforcing the trademark?

* Do you want *other* companies to be allowed to use "Julia" trademarks in their name?

I want to be clear - I am all for commercialization efforts around open source and am very excited about where Julia is headed. I also don't have any ideas about what the answers to these questions should be for your community.

Cheers,

Brian

On Saturday, May 9, 2015 at 1:20:15 PM UTC-7, Viral Shah wrote:

[Waldir Pimenta]

On Sunday, May 10, 2015 at 1:33:58 AM UTC+1, Eric Forgy wrote:

If we pay developers to clean up an existing package, it feels weird to just give the work we paid for away. Any thoughts on how I should think about this? I probably just need some education and am open to suggestions.

I think others already responded adequately to this. It's certainly strange at first, but just because we're used to think in terms of goods that are produced by one person or organization and can't be improved by third-parties in a way that benefits everyone else (including the original creator). Open source projects (and collaborative projects in general, made possible by relatively recent developments like the Internet, robust DVCS, FOSS licenses, etc.) made this possible, and in this paradigm it is indeed more beneficial to embrace the collaboration aspect than to look at things from a purely competitive point of view. A good read about this topic (albeit certainly well-known enough that the suggestion is probably redundant) is Eric S. Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar". "Wikinomics" by Don Tapscott is also an excellent resource, and a natural follow-up to the trends he had pointed out earlier in "Growing Up Digital".
 

It would be interesting if Github issues could be given a $ value, i.e. "resolve this issue and receive $x in fees". This could be an effective way to prioritize :)

That is actually exactly what is being done by BountySource: people can place bounties on specific issues, which get paid upon successful closing of the report. Take a look!

On Sunday, May 10, 2015 at 4:20:15 AM UTC+8, Viral Shah wrote:

As you all know, we are committed to Julia being high quality and open source. (...) Open source development will never cease.

Hi Viral, I have a small request. Do you think it would make sense to include on Julia Computing's website (either on the home page or in an separate page) a note about this commitment to the open source aspect of Julia and the continued use of open development practices (public mailing lists, IRC channel, issue tracker, etc.)? I'd love to add you to the community-curated list of open companies being built here.

[Viral Shah]

> On 12-May-2015, at 2:06 pm, Waldir Pimenta <waldir....@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Viral, I have a small request. Do you think it would make sense to include on Julia Computing's website (either on the home page or in an separate page) a note about this commitment to the open source aspect of Julia and the continued use of open development practices (public mailing lists, IRC channel, issue tracker, etc.)? I'd love to add you to the community-curated list of open companies being built here.

I think this is a great idea. We will add our commitment to open source Julia to the website.

-viral

[Marcus Appelros]

Am interested in being part of this venture. Every undertaking must be motivated as optimally beneficient for the world as a whole, therefore the following proposal might be acceptable to all:

Will do consulting on implementing Julian AI/physics/math in exchange for donations to charitable endeavors, one of which suitably can be a strictly non-profit project to spread Julia in the developing world.

Credentials include top grades in online AI courses from Caltech and Stanford, several certificates in physics and maximum score on a official IQ-test taken by close to everyone in Sweden.

[Scott Jones]

About Julia Computing, is Stefan also going to be working full time for Julia Computing?  As the second largest contributor (and most vocal!), I think

that would be critical (and would be greatly reassuring to people betting on Julia...).

His GitHub shows him living in NYC, but that he's an MIT Research Scientist... (I didn't know MIT had a satellite campus in NYC! ;-) ).

-Scott

[Yichao Yu]

On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 2:43 PM, Scott Jones <scott.pa...@gmail.com> wrote:
> About Julia Computing, is Stefan also going to be working full time for
> Julia Computing? As the second largest contributor (and most vocal!), I

I guess the answer is probably yes according to here[1]

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

[Stefan Karpinski]

Yes, that's correct – I'm also a cofounder of Julia Computing.

[Jim Garrison]

There's one point from the HN thread (and echoed a few other places) that I'd like to add some thoughts on.

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.

One important difference between Red Hat and Julia Computing is that Linus Torvalds does not work for Red Hat.  In fact, although many core contributors to Linux have worked for various distributions, Linus himself has gone to great lengths never to work for a single distribution so that he could always remain in a position of perceived neutrality.  This led to some growing pains for some time when he had a day job at Transmeta, but since 2003 he has worked full-time on Linux for OSDL (now the Linux Foundation), a 501c6 nonprofit organization.

My ideal would be to see something similar for Julia -- a nonprofit home that employs the core decision makers in Julia land.  Of course this is a long-term solution, and what is needed right now is a solution for the short to medium term.  And to be honest, I think when the time comes to have a more neutral organization, your customers are likely to push you in that direction anyway...

Short of that, it might be worth studying some other models that exist now.  LLVM/Apple is one that comes to mind, though that is part of a much larger company with a different kind of revenue source than Julia Computing will have.  I don't know much about how (or how successfully) Apple has managed to keep LLVM a true community project while employing the project's leader, but it is perhaps an example to consider (and one that is especially relevant to Julia).

Basically, I would love if you would keep in mind the ideal of having at least one of you work for a neutral organization in the future.  Anything you can arrange for now that will allow such a transition to be done easily when the time comes is, I would think, a good idea.

I am incredibly confident in the future of Julia and wish you all the best!

Jim

[Scott Jones]

Yes, it was clear that you were also a cofounder of Julia Computing, what was not clear, just from your GitHub info, if you were actively working for JC, or for MIT, or splitting your time between them.

I do hope there’s enough funding so that you’ll be able to work full time on the language.

Besides Jeff, Viral, and yourself, who else is currently working full or part-time for JC?  (just thinking about the initials... is this the “Second Coming", at least for computer languages? ;-) )

This isn’t meant to be overly nosy, however, it is important information for people like me who are trying to convince their clients that 1) any issues they have in Julia can be addressed, 2) Julia will be around for the long haul, and 3) Julia will not suddenly split into an open source version and a closed “enterprise” version that has all the good stuff...  (it kind of seems that way with Aerospike, for example).

I really do wish all of you all the best, and for a very long future for Julia!

[Viral Shah]

The co-founders include the three of us, Alan, Keno, and Deepak who is helping develop the business. The team strength is closing in on 12. We will be updating our website shortly with all this information. On the open source part, we have reaffirmed our commitment here.

As I said in my earlier email, we will also write a blog post addressing all issues raised here. It seems that most of the questions have already been raised, and some also discussed. We’ll put out a well articulated response in the next few days, so that everything is clear and in one place.

-viral

[Scott Jones]

Very good to know!  I assume Alan is staying on as an MIT professor, evangelizing Julia to bright young MIT students. ;-)

What about Keno and Jameson?

Digging around shows they are still students (which surprised me a bit... I’ve been very impressed with their comments and contributions).

I’d hope that they would think that working full time on Julia at JC would be a great gig after they finish their pesky degrees...

The more major contributors are working full-time at JC (or another Julia-centric company), the easier I think it is to “sell” using Julia is to my clients...

-Scott

[Páll Haraldsson]

On Tuesday, May 12, 2015 at 9:03:37 AM UTC, Viral Shah wrote:

I think this is a great idea. We will add our commitment to open source Julia to the website.

I for one am not worried. I can at least see both sides, it's good that there is a company/consulting to point to.

Playing devil's advocate: They could always change their commitment, stop working there etc. The license (MIT) allows anyone to take the language proprietary. Depending on your view, it's a bad or a good thing. Say for proprietary 3D games you can use MIT licensed Julia (maybe by design?).

Julia is also GPL ("as a whole", when using those libraries, that can be excluded). Including them, it would be ok to distribute the language and say your game as "mere aggregation" (I might be wrong..?), but for them or anyone to change the core language or libraries (or add MKL) to proprietary would be a gray area (unless GPL libraries excluded) or more like a violation. So, I'm not worried, as it seems they can't make "full Julia" proprietary.

Say you would make the language (restricted set) proprietary - anyone can do that - you have a fork. This has only happened twice, that I know of, but then in non-proprietary ways; SJulia (in a minor way, no longer a fork) and Intel's Julia-to-C compiler.

As far as I know, Julia does not have a specification (let alone an official standard). I do not think I need to be worried - I do not see a good reason to fork Julia (or most forks would, I assume, be soon mainlined) or for people to do it to a core language/programmer-centered project (but it is a good right..) and it seems the source code can and will be the only "specification"..

Stallman would like GPL in situations like languages (compilers/glibC - with linking exception) and more.. and Linus for Linux kernel ("tit for tat").

I'm not sure Linus' GPL argument applies to languages.. I'm not either sure why MIT license was chosen.. by default since MIT-folks?

Not saying better, but would less-restrictive (than GPL) MPL 2.0 ("file based copyleft") have made sense? Or Apache 2.0? [Or could still be used for new files?] I do not know of any patents on Julia code.. those two have a say in patents - are there any? I assume no (see Karpinski had an unrelated one and in interesting world record..).

-- 

Palli.

[Jim Garrison]

Here is a related question: Who will own and operate the julialang.org domain?  Would you be willing to transfer it to NumFocus or a similar nonprofit, community entity?

[Stefan Karpinski]

Currently I own the domain, but transferring it to NumFocus would be fine if they do that (which I can find out).

[Viral Shah]

As much as I would like to do so, I also want to have enough funding for the "Julia foundation" (NumFocus) in place before transferring over community resources.

We look at everything closely so that things don't fall through the cracks. For someone else to do that, we need an organisational structure.

We are working hard with a couple of folks on funding some people to work full time for the foundation. I welcome any ideas on raising funds to pay for a couple of developers and a part time project manager, to start with.

-viral

[Jameson Nash]

I am one of the more recent people to join Julia Computing, so that I am now able to work full-time on Julia. It's been a great way to merge a mutual hobby – of contributing to the open-source Julia project – with day-to-day responsibilities.

[Jim Garrison]

Hi Viral and Stefan,

Thanks for the replies.

To be clear, I have no opposition to a third party organization (e.g. Julia Computing) hosting the web site as an in-kind donation to Julia (the community project).  The GNOME website, for instance, is currently hosted by Canonical, and it has been hosted by Red Hat in the past.  The gnome.org domain, on the other hand, is owned by the GNOME Foundation, which is how I believe it should be for a community .org.

The administrative cost to owning and periodically renewing a domain is nevertheless nonzero, even though it is less than the cost of hosting web/email/etc.  I agree that it is important to make sure that the organization tasked with maintaining it is able to do so without things falling through the cracks, and I'd hope that NumFocus could handle this as a fiscal sponsor; in fact, they mention hosting as a service they offer at <http://numfocus.org/foundation/>.

As Viral mentions, when relying on NumFocus to do more it is important to make sure they are adequately funded.  I will plan to think more about how we can raise funds for them to do Julia-related things.  As a first step, I just myself joined NumFocus as a Supporting Member, which I had not realized was possible until now.

Jim

[Viral Shah]

Hi everyone,

Some more details on NumFocus. When we joined NumFocus, Stefan joined their board. In addition, 5 people represent the Julia project in the NumFocus Fiscal Sponsorship Agreement  - Tim Holy, Steve Johnson, John Myles White, Jeff, and myself. This will be the group that manages the Julia project under the NumFocus foundation. Now that I think of it, this information should probably go on julialang.org.

Thus, the governance structure for Julia as an open source project has been formed to a large extent. When we have funds earmarked for Julia at NumFocus, I imagine an executive structure also being put in place, where we may have someone doing project management, fund raising, hiring, etc., and also hire a few full time developers. This requires some non-trivial fundraising to bootstrap, and all ideas are welcome, and any help will be appreciated.

The domain name is only the start. There are lots of other community resources - Julialang accounts on Github, Travis-CI, Appveyor, and AWS, the website, the whole JuliaCon, trademarks, logos and licensing terms, etc. Our goal has always been to create an organization that outlives all of us, and that Julia continues to exist and improve for time immemorial. Julia is now reaching a stage where we need to start thinking of the long term - which is why we outlined the three organizations to further the use of Julia in different domains.

-viral

[Scott Jones]

On Friday, May 15, 2015 at 3:14:22 AM UTC-4, Viral Shah wrote:

Hi everyone,

Some more details on NumFocus. When we joined NumFocus, Stefan joined their board. In addition, 5 people represent the Julia project in the NumFocus Fiscal Sponsorship Agreement  - Tim Holy, Steve Johnson, John Myles White, Jeff, and myself. This will be the group that manages the Julia project under the NumFocus foundation. Now that I think of it, this information should probably go on julialang.org.

Thus, the governance structure for Julia as an open source project has been formed to a large extent. When we have funds earmarked for Julia at NumFocus, I imagine an executive structure also being put in place, where we may have someone doing project management, fund raising, hiring, etc., and also hire a few full time developers. This requires some non-trivial fundraising to bootstrap, and all ideas are welcome, and any help will be appreciated.

The domain name is only the start. There are lots of other community resources - Julialang accounts on Github, Travis-CI, Appveyor, and AWS, the website, the whole JuliaCon, trademarks, logos and licensing terms, etc. Our goal has always been to create an organization that outlives all of us, and that Julia continues to exist and improve for time immemorial. Julia is now reaching a stage where we need to start thinking of the long term - which is why we outlined the three organizations to further the use of Julia in different domains.

OK, don’t know if anybody here watches HBO’s Silicon Valley... we need lots of swag!  I’m hoping you’ll be selling neat Julia t-shirts etc. at JuliaCon ;-)

I want to have a t-shirt with the JuliaTM logo on one side, and “One language to rule them all, and in the ??? bind them...”  (I’d thought of “brightness”, as opposed to the One Ring’s “darkness”... not sure if that is the best word... suggestions welcome ;-) )

[Tim Holy]

On Friday, May 15, 2015 04:59:26 AM Jameson Nash wrote:
> I am one of the more recent people to join Julia Computing, so that I am
> now able to work full-time on Julia. It's been a great way to merge a
> mutual hobby – of contributing to the open-source Julia project – with
> day-to-day responsibilities.

This news makes my world better. As in, a lot better. Congratulations to both
Julia Computing and Jameson on a crucial hire!

--Tim

[Scott Jones]

I second that, congratulations Jameson!  (all of this really helps me sell Julia to clients ;-) )

[Scott Jones]

On Friday, May 15, 2015 at 5:52:30 AM UTC-4, Scott Jones wrote:

I second that, congratulations Jameson!  (all of this really helps me sell Julia to clients ;-) )

Oops, that sounded bad!  I am *not* selling in the sense of charging money for Julia! (even though I think the MIT license would permit that!)

No, I convince them to pay *me* money to program in Julia... much more fun than programming in C++, IMHO!

[Brandon Booth]

Any chance Julia Computing is working with any government agencies? I work for a federal agency and am making a pitch to make Julia available as an alternative to SAS and Stata. I've been given permission to use Julia for a current project with the expectation that I put together a business case for making Julia more widely available. One early objection was the lack of commercial support. It appears that is no longer an issue. Still, pointing to other government agencies currently using Julia would make my pitch much easier. 

[Viral Shah]

Yes, we in fact are working with a government lab. See the talk by Robert Moss at JuliaCon on “Using Julia as a Specification Language for the Next Generation Airborne Collision Avoidance System”.

http://juliacon.org/sched.html

Please do write to me if you need details/materials to convince people to use Julia. We know that there are many organizations where people would prefer to have someone supporting Julia before they will even experiment with it, and that is one of the main reasons we set up Julia Computing. We would love to help out in any way possible.

-viral

[Eric Forgy]

Hi Viral,

This is good info. I suggest including it at juliacomputing.com. A list of universities, government agencies, and businesses using Julia would also be good. I suspect the list would already be impressive.

Best wishes!

[Avik Sengupta]

To quickly follow up on the training materials comment, 

David Sander's tutorial that he delivered at SciPi is available here: https://github.com/dpsanders/scipy_2014_julia . David is also doing a tutorial at JuliaCon I believe. 

I have used something similar for a couple of sessions, the material is available here: https://github.com/aviks/learn-julia . Feel free to reuse. 

Regards

-

Avik

On Monday, 11 May 2015 11:48:52 UTC+1, Viral Shah wrote:

That’s fantastic to hear, and thanks for the good wishes. We are using much of the already public training material for the most part right now, but we expect to refine it with every engagement, and put out something new as soon as we have something substantially better.

-viral



> On 10-May-2015, at 4:42 pm, Ken B <ken.bas...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I was able to "sell" Julia recently for a small 2,5 month consultancy project at a research institute. The main difficulty in convincing the client was the uncertain long term support for the language, so I'm very happy to see this Julia Computing LLC up and running.
>
> I agree with Scott that a list of organisations using Julia would be very valuable for further promotion. Viral, would that be possible?
>
> Eric, I put the project online under an MIT license. The idea was that the more people use it, the more valuable it would become as it might receive issues and fixes for free. This is of course very much project dependent.
>
> Also, I've just started at a University where I plan to promote Julia, so I hope that Julia Computing LLC will share their training material.
>
> And finally, best of luck with the new company!
>
> Best regards, Ken
>
> On Sunday, 10 May 2015 02:33:58 UTC+2, Eric Forgy wrote:
> I think this is great. Our startup has similar issues. We want to do innovative work, but that work needs funding, so we also do some consulting/training to pay the R&D bills. It can be a challenge to find the right balance though, so beware :)
>
> Given the position of Julia Computing, another potential source of revenue for you is helping companies (like mine) with recruiting. If you kept a database of Julia developers looking for employment opportunities, firms (like mine) would be willing to pay up to 3 months salary for "finding fees". Speaking of which, do you know anyone in Hong Kong? :)
>
> One question I have though is about how to balance open source versus proprietary development. There are currently Julia packages we're using that could use some professional development to clean up and make production worthy. If we pay developers to clean up an existing package, it feels weird to just give the work we paid for away. Any thoughts on how I should think about this? I probably just need some education and am open to suggestions. It would be interesting if Github issues could be given a $ value, i.e. "resolve this issue and receive $x in fees". This could be an effective way to prioritize :)

[Stefan Karpinski]

This VentureBeat interview with Viral has some more info about our position regarding open source:

http://venturebeat.com/2015/05/18/why-the-creators-of-the-julia-programming-language-just-launched-a-startup/

In particular, this paragraph:

We feel really fortunate that Julia has become such a healthy open-source project – at this point, it is clearly here for the long haul. Some people have expressed concern that we might be tempted to undermine that by handicapping the open version and selling a closed version with better functionality. This would not only be bad for the project, but also terrible for our business. No one has made a good business off this kind of move: it ends up sabotaging the project, which in turn ultimately kills the business. We’re in this for the duration — our goal is to create a vibrant and fruitful collaborative ecosystem, that includes academic researchers, developers who contribute for personal enjoyment, and companies using Julia for business.