My suggestion: release as open source, and then try a kickstarter to see if there is interest in extending/continuing the project.
IDE is a tough business. It has broken many. After all there is a reason intellij open-sourced the core in the first place. Frankly I think there is a bigger market in using clojure to develop better tools for other languages. If you have a nice intellij wrapper, then you have a huge advantage in developing tooling in general. On a side note, I would love to see intellij's widget library broken out in a more stand-alone way, so we can develop sexy clojure apps with pure jvm technology. Any thoughts on if that is technically doable? On Sat, Jul 27, 2013 at 4:54 AM, Colin Fleming <colin.mailingl...@gmail.com>wrote: > Hi all, > > I was planning to wait a little longer before going public, but since it's > pretty relevant to the other IntelliJ thread going on at the moment I > thought I'd jump in. For the last couple of months of happy unemployment > I've been working on a fork of La Clojure which is now about 70% migrated > to Clojure and significantly improved. It's a lot of work to develop a tool > like this, and one of the options I'm considering is starting a company to > develop it as a commercial product - JetBrains have never maintained > development of La Clojure very actively. I've been doing a little market > research but there's really not much data around about whether there are > enough people working with Clojure to sustain a product like that, and also > the community is currently very focused on open source. > > One problem is that the IDE space is already fairly fractured - there's > Emacs and CCW, Clooj, Sublime Text and the promise of Light Table at some > point, and of course the current public version of La Clojure. But there's > still not a great option for something that's powerful but easy to use - > CCW is probably the closest thing to this right now. However I think it's > telling that a large fraction of people in the State of Clojure 2012 survey > still identified development tools as a major pain point. > > I think that the IntelliJ platform is a fantastic base to build something > like this on. Clojure as a language makes it pretty challenging to develop > a lot of the great functionality that JetBrains are famous for, but I think > there's scope to do a lot of great things. Certainly for mixed Clojure/Java > projects it would be difficult to beat, but even for Clojure only projects > I can imagine a lot of fantastic functionality built on their > infrastructure. My plan would be to release a standalone IDE and a plugin > for people using IntelliJ Ultimate for web dev, Ruby/Python or whatever. > Since it's mostly Clojure now (and I'm migrating what's left as I get to > it) there's a real possibility of a Clojure plugin/extension API. I > envision charging PyCharm/RubyMine type prices, say $200 for company > licenses or $100 for individual developers. > > So, I'd love to hear what people think. I'd appreciate it if we could stay > away from the politics of open source vs proprietary - several people have > told me privately that they'd rather use OSS and that's fine, proprietary > isn't for everyone. What I'd like to know is if the idea is appealing to > many people here? > > In case it's a concern for anyone, I've discussed this with JetBrains. > > Thanks for any feedback, > > Cheers, > Colin > > -- > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "Clojure" group. > To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com > Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with > your first post. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en > --- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Clojure" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. > > > -- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
