Graal does, but the JavaScript engine does not. And the main thing the commercial edition of Graal gives is just faster performance. You can run GraalJS without

Graal does, but the JavaScript engine does not. And the main thing the commercial edition of Graal gives is just faster performance. You can run GraalJS without the commercial edition and even without Graal at all! (it acts as an interpreter, in that case). Languages these days cannot expect to be financially sustainable in and of themselves as it only incentivizes non-free actions against its users/developers That's a circular argument. "Languages can't expect to be free because that'd require charging for something". Well, yes, by its nature that requires charging users for something. I also wonder how you're defining "language" here. It seems to be pretty expansive. Java has a free top of class virtual machine, free compilers, free IDEs, free frameworks and so on. Many companies also sell enhanced versions of some of these things but that doesn't make the free versions less free. It might seem impractical to expect free language/runtime development paid by the stewards and with no cost on the developers, but it's clearly the only way to keep the ecosystem thriving sans perverse incentives. I actually have come to disagree with this over time, I see it as the other way around. If there's no commercial model, that's when the perverse incentives start. In the vacuum left by the obvious incentive of pleasing your customers, steps various perverse and self-destructive incentives instead, like "make a name for myself as someone very clever" or "do as little work as I can whilst not getting fired" or "experiment with fun research topics that probably won't amount to much". Profit is ultimately just a signal that your users really do value what you're making. Without that signal things get crazy really fast. If this wasn't the case then academic languages would constantly smash commercially developed languages, but the most popular languages are generally the ones developed by companies who are focused - at least to some extent - on adoption. So not only do I not begrudge firms making commercially enhanced versions of things like programming tools, I have come to welcome it, because I associate a desire for profit with hard-headed, pragmatic and ultimately beneficial decision making.