I am about to (next two or three months) launch a company/product that is heavily built on Clojure(script) too and I was actually thinking about this exact thing just this week! There are a number of libraries that I rely on that I would love to give back to, both as a thanks for the work so far, and to fund future development. I'm not in a position to do so yet, but its something I very strongly hope to do in the not-too-distant future, if things go generally well.
I founded operatr.io. Our product, static site, and licensing systems are entirely built in CLJ/CLJS. JVM, brower, lambda, etc.
Like JWR I feel there's absolutely zero chance we could have built this product as effectively in my previous primary JVM languages. Clojure is just a better toolset, no comparison.
We recently enquired with Github about sponsoring as an organisation (rather than me using my personal account) and have been added to the waitlist for the alpha of organisation-sponsoring. Once that starts we'll contribute financially to the developers in our space who enable our business.
Also as a habit I send personal emails to open source contributors simply to thank them in person.
Good luck with your launch!
P.s. I'm very excited for the team at Cognitect. It's hard to start a consultancy, hard to launch a product, there are no guarantees of success, and they deserve all of it.
You could sign up at https://www.clojuriststogether.org/ They do a pretty good job sponsoring both new-ish and critical projects within the clojure ecosystem
Yes, I do plan to! Thanks for reminding me. I do want to look into contributing to a few specific projects that I rely on too, though. Or at least look into hiring the authors for a contracting gig (at least one author of well known libraries does this). I’m not yet financially in a position to do this, but I’m hopeful.
I think even small contributions make a lot of sense, especially if you gradually increase them over time. This is not to gain fame, it's to contribute and support sustainable development. My contributions are spread thin and the amounts sometimes look silly ($5 or $10 per month for a developer), but I believe they do make a difference and I intend to slowly increase them all as finances allow.
I'd suggest looking at Clojurists Together, Github Sponsors and direct sponsorships through PayPal subscriptions.
I look at it as an R&D expenditure (and it goes into my financials as such).
