I'm mostly in agreement with Stefan that typical business models tend to lead to worse outcomes overall. I can think of a few reasons: * Much of the power of computing comes from the composition of different technologies but there are active disincentives to making your tools compose with the competition. Creating standards takes time and effort, reduces lockin and enables competitors, but it's also the basis for most of our fundamental improvements in technology. * For whatever reasons, businesses in the last few decades have a strong tendency towards short-term thinking whereas really fundamental improvements take a long time. Eg many languages in use today took 5-10 years to reach usability whereas a typical startup funding cycle wants to see serious attention in the first 2 years. * Complexity has a tragedy-of-the-commons effect where increasing the complexity of your own offering can help outshine the competition and win you customers, but when everyone increases the complexity of their tools the overall result is impossible to manage. * For startups in particular, there is a strong risk that they'll get acquired or shut down and their technology will disappear from the world. My own approach at the moment is to take advantage of how ridiculously overpaid programming is, where 1-2 months of unrelated consulting is enough to fund a year of working on my own projects. But it's also worth looking at how existing projects manage: * Zig is entirely funded by github sponsors and explicitly chose that option to retain the freedom to work on whatever they think is important. * Julia used to be funded mainly by public research grants but has also been working on enterprise support accompanied by a few proprietary tools. I haven't looked into how successful the latter is. * Clojure was funded mostly by consulting - not for work on the language itself but on the premise that the language made them better at other tasks. That's an interesting model because it forces you to very directly face any shortcomings in the language. * Rust, I think, doesn't have any central funding but several people are employed by companies that use it to work on the language full-time. * Sqlite sells paid support and also some proprietary tests/extensions that are mostly useful for high assurance domains eg putting sqlite on a plane. I particularly like this little note on the sqlite page:

Hwaci is a small company but it is also closely held and debt-free and has low fixed costs, which means that it is largely immune to buy-outs, take-overs, and market down-turns. Hwaci intends to continue operating in its current form, and at roughly its current size until at least the year 2050. We expect to be here when you need us, even if that need is many years in the future.

It's a reminder that these problems aren't inherent to businesses in general, but just to a particular set of ideas about how business should be run that seems to be in the water these days. It seems like small businesses that intend to stay small are better at resisting them. A more recent example is Sourcehut, which is funded by paid subscriptions but still releases all the code under AGPL and exposes simple apis and data exports for each individual service.

The sort of future-of-programming vision quest things like dynamicland or, sort of, ink & switch, are longer bets and more likely to produce prototypes with no practical use before they potentially invent the future