caxistic

Needs to go even further, and deregulate access to prescription drugs as well, to open up provider competition and increase consumer choice.

I'd love to see this be adopted in the US, but I'm not holding my breath.

There's an example of this in my field that upsets me quite a bit. A set of tools were developed using public funds through federal research grants and other similar mechanisms, with the express purpose of making free alternatives to private tools available. After the project was successfully completed, the leaders of the project decided to start charging hundreds of dollars for "maintenance" of the toolset, which would only run on Apple devices no less. (For some tools, the cost is substantially less than private alternatives; for others it's more expensive or about the same.)

My concern about this isn't so much that they started charging money to maintain the project per se, after federal grants ran dry. My concern is that the product development costs were already paid for using taxpayer dollars, and that if it were open-sourced, it would be almost as usable, if not more usable (if it were ported to other non-Apple platforms), and free.

The other area of this that I find upsetting are these "small business grants" that basically use taxpayer funds for VC software development, with no public return. Government pays for software development, and then the developer gets to charge for it later.

As someone who's watched the rise of R and Python from its beginnings, who pulled my hair out in frustration over the longevity of MATLAB long ago, and who has tried just about every numerical programming language it seems, I think the threat to Julia probably comes more from other LLVM-based languages like Nim or Crystal, or things like Rust or Kotlin.

Julia's adoption rate is really impressive compared to R or things like numpy, etc. so I'm not worried about that. But I do think it will have to contend with a number of competitors in the same space.