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Do programming languages need business models?

• revelio 3y ago
  One that pays expensive senior full time SWEs to build it does, yes. Every programming language uses one of two models: 1. Patronage 2. Business Patronage is the Ruby/Python/Linux "one guy + volunteers" model where a few of the devs look for companies to pay them to do it as a full or side project basically for marketing purposes or because that company can afford to subsidize their tools. This clearly isn't that. A VC backed startup making an open source language is neither patronage nor a business, unless you take the hard-cynic position of saying the investors have been tricked into being patrons. I'm assuming they've got some sort of cloud related ideas for monetization, but it's tough.