Clojurists Together – Q2 2026 Open Source Funding Announcement (opens in new tab)

(clojuriststogether.org)

124 pointsdragandj8d ago14 comments

14 comments

jwr7d ago

If you use Clojure for your business, please consider funding this effort and also directly developers who work on software that you use. It makes for a sustainable ecosystem.

The Clojure community is very mature and incredibly nice, so things are not bad as they are, but they could definitely be better.

I try to set aside a portion of my business revenue (I call it a "sustainability fee" in my P&L) and spread it among the authors of libraries that I use. It's not much for each author, but if everybody did this, many authors could work on open source libraries full time.

dustingetz7d ago

what needs funding is clojure core, Clojurists Together is a nice effort to try to fill a gap but what my business needs, and other business owners tell me they need, is for the core language (clojure and clojurescript) to not feel like it is falling apart. I want to invest my money in targeted, specific high value problems and get leverage on my money by sharing the cost with other business owners who need the same issues fixed. Until such a vector exists, the next best thing (for my business) is to fund a few key maintainers directly via github sponsorship. But because it is indirect and not outcomes-driven, the money amounts will be smaller. My business can afford to invest more than the $2400 per year that we have been donating since the release of Electric. My business has employed 4 devs for 5+ years, I can find more budget for investments in Clojure. Businesses pay for things (unlike individuals). We want to pay. We want our key dependencies to thrive. But there is no vector to invest in the specific core issues that would benefit my business to improve. And this makes me sad because over the last few years I find myself leaning more and more away from Clojure, even repelled (as if by some invisible force), instead of leaning in.

uxcolumbo7d ago

Cognitect is a holding of NuBank (since 2020 I believe).

Doesn't that mean the core developers are now funded by NuBank?

Isn't it in their interest that 'the core language (Clojure and Clojurescript) to not feel like it is falling apart'?

And what do you mean with falling apart?

I'm new to Clojure, so the above is a genuine question.

millettjon7d ago

Given that software is composed of a hierarchy of dependencies, I would like to see a funding approach that works at the dependency tree level to support an entire tree or sub tree. There is a huge freeloader problem where business don't contribute any support for their core dependencies. I wonder if there is a role for an organization that could act as the interface for corporate support at the dependency tree level. It could offload maintainers (or fund them) to handle certain compliance requirements and provide an official sanctioned entity for purposes of corporate policies. There should be a way to garner support broadly for risk management and specifically for security in the corporate context.

thom7d ago

What's core issues are you thinking of?

cfiggers8d ago

I wasn't aware of the Gloat project before this. It's a compiler that turns Clojure into native binaries by first transpiling to Glojure (which I'd also never heard of before this), which in turn targets Go. This is rather than using a GraalVM native image, which as I understand it is at this point the better-explored mechanism of doing that for JVM-based stuff (but has its own trade-offs).

Very cool!

jiehong7d ago

I can see why people try this way: graalvm is limited outside the entreprise version, and it’s quite slow to compile with.

I think the aot compilation story on the JVM lacks fast tooling with good UX compared to go.

digitaltrees7d ago

Reminds me of S.P.A.T from about a boy.

snitty8d ago

How is the demonym not Clojuristas?

arikrahman8d ago

The demonym I've most commonly seen is Clojurian.

user39393828d ago

Clojurist makes it sound like adherents to a belief, which does imply identity though Clojurian more directly so. I’ve also found Clojurian most often. If only we had software that indexed the popularity of words…

arikrahman7d ago

In that case, Clojurians can be used for new initiates and Clojurists can be used for the most dogmatic Clojure supremacists, like myself.

manytimesaway8d ago

Two of these projects are just AI. This is not very promising.

gargamel97d ago

Neither of them is AI genetated software though. One is a fast Clojure LLM inference library, and the other a MCP server, both coded by humans, without AI.

stingraycharles8d ago

I know at least one of them and it has already existed for a decade or so, and is a legit framework, so this isn’t some hype based thing.

And Clojure is legitimately good at data processing.

The MCP server is a relatively simple project, don’t think that’s a bad idea.

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