Clojurists Together Foundation Launches!

Conservancy Sunsets Charitable Donations for Clojurists Together Grants

May 18, 2020

Clojurists Together, in conjunction with Software Freedom Conservancy, announces today the formation of the Clojurists Together Foundation, a new trade organization, dedicated to funding and supporting open source software, infrastructure, and documentation that is important to the Clojure and ClojureScript community. For the past four years, Conservancy, a charitable 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, managed Clojars' development grant program, known as “Clojurists Together” has been managed by Conservancy, a charitable 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. The Clojurists Together program, under Conservancy's auspices, funded creation of free and open source software, infrastructure, and documentation that the Clojure/ClojureScript community relies on, licensed freely for use, modification, and redistribution by the general public.

Clojars joined Conservancy in February 2017. Conservancy helped Clojars create and manage the Clojurists Together grant program. Since late 2017, the program has funded critical Clojars and Clojure development including code, infrastructure files and documentation. Conservancy funded critical projects such as Bruce Hauman's Figwheel tool, an updated API and other features for clj-http, a widely used base HTTP client. All told, Conservancy managed over $200,000 for this program, and gave grants and contractor payments of over $150,000 for code development on Clojars and Clojure. Conservancy and Clojars transparently published contemporaneous highlights of that work.

We have all been excited and proud of this excellent work for the last four years. After much collaborative discussion between Conservancy and Clojars, we have agreed that the newer initiatives and upcoming plans for Clojars belong in a new independent trade association which provides ways for for-profit companies to join together to fund and influence important open source work and also have direct control over their assets and operations to accomplish this work with their own timescale and procedures. We have thus encouraged and advised the Clojars community as they created the Clojurists Together Foundation.

Conservancy will spend remaining charitably donated funds eamarked for Clojars in ways that benefit the charitable mission of Conservancy within the Clojure and ClojureScript community. However, Conservancy will no longer accept donations earmarked for Clojars starting on Monday June 1, 2020. Conservancy will automatically terminate automated donation accounts and refund any Clojars donations that arrive after that date.

Finally, we would like to specifically thank Daniel Compton for his tireless work and dedication to FOSS that he has shown throughout this process. Daniel worked as a volunteer to build the Clojurists Together program with Conservancy to help advance software freedom in his community and his commitment to that truly embodies the mission of advancing software freedom for the public that Conservancy pursues.