Selecting good candidates for a job is a difficult task, so companies prefer to pay for augmenting the likelihood of interviewing the right people.
Exercism have readily available performance data from several thousand programmers all around the world, tabulated by skill set, along with contacting info.
Even if they don't sell that data to anyone (they shoudn't), they can politely contact skilled professionals at the right time with interview offers from third parties.
That's my guess.
I agree with you that Wikipedia lists the company as "For Profit: No" -- however, there's no citation.
The following Terms of Service (these Terms ) are an agreement between Exercism, Inc and you, and governs your permitted use of our Platform .
File Number: 6269319 Incorporation Date / Formation Date: 1/3/2017
(mm/dd/yyyy)
Entity Name: EXERCISM, INC.
Entity Kind: Corporation Entity Type: General
Residency: Domestic State: DELAWARE
A - General - Type General refers to a legal entity with no special attributes such as non profit or religious.
I'm not claiming there's anything nefarious going on. I also use for-profit services all the time (Google, Apple, Amazon, Grocery stores)
However, I think non-profit vs for-profit is relevant because
Again, I don't have anything against for-profits. I just want to know upfront that I'm dealing with one.
I think it's pretty clear from all the information available that exercism is not positioning itself to profit from the users or contributors. The exercism, inc entity was established only to provide a buffer between the project and the founder's personal assets. Exercism may not be technically listed as a non-profit entity, but if you have concerns about that, raising an issue on the github repo might clarify the situation for you.
From this issue:
To colour things in a little more: We have no plans to raise external investment (been there, done that, not a fan) and Exercism - the learning platform - will always be entirely free.
Taking Exercism to where we want it to get to (helping millions of people regardless of their background) is going to involve having money though. We eventually want a full time team working on different aspects and we want to be able to do things like letting people code on the website, not exclusively offline via the CLI. For those things we'll need cash beyond what Katrina and I are able to put in. We're trying to work this out, and see if there are other products around it that we could build that will help fund it moving forward (e.g. maybe something around recruitment) and/or sponsorship and/or government donations, etc. I'm a Director a charity that gets over $1m per year in government funding - it would be nice if we could replicate that for example.
A very strong consideration for us is making sure that we don't unduly benefit from the work of others - that's very much at the forefront of our attitudes and thoughts as we discuss all this, and it's why we're taking our time to make sure we get it right. We're 100% not building Exercism to try and get rich - none of the leadership team is motivated by that - but it would be nice if it was able to be successful self-sufficient
I look forward to sharing all our conclusions when we get there and thanks again for the thoughtful question
Also potentially of interest:
Not soliciting donations from individuals
Some funding via grant from Mozilla
I don't have any concerns with that. I respect the Exercism's team to run Exercism however they wish.
My only concern is that a post asking people to donate their time to Exercism should state up front that:
That's all. I don't think this is an unreasonable requirement when asking people to donate their time.
Please note your wording, "donate" their time. Donating implies that there will be little to nothing given back, with it usually meaning that they will not get anything back. As defined in a dictionary:
Definition of donate
: to make a gift of
especially : to contribute to a public or charitable cause
Meaning that it is a gift, in this case to Exercism, which, as aforementioned, implies that nothing to very little (with the frequent exception of a small non-profitable token of gratitude, like a thank-you note) is expected in return.
You're right.
should be rewritten with s/donate/contribute.
The point stands:
Despite numerous people defending Exercism's business model, I don't see anything controversial concerning the above two statements.
You are conflating a legal definition with an organization's underlying motivation. Just because an organization does not classify as non-profit does not mean they are actively seeking to profit monetarily.
Likewise a non-profit designation does not preclude unscrupulous opportunism. Most non-profit hospital systems in the USA demonstrate this principle.
The defense stems from the implication your repeated statements make. By emphasizing the lack of non-profit designation you are intentionally implying that the exercism team is attempting to take advantage of volunteers. Even a cursory look into the project or the individuals running it would suggest the opposite is true.
There are numerous examples of start ups that (1) offer a community something for free (2) build a user base and (3) sell the company to a third party.
Exercisam has a right to be for-profit.
However, the fact Exercism is for-profit should be stated.
Not really. It should only be stated if you assume the worst in people. I choose not to.
Exercism is NOT a for-profit company. Since a few months it is in the transition to become a non-profit organization.
And no, there is no payment for mentors. This is volunteers giving their time to support and grow the community. I'm a mentor there since a few months now.
So, zeroexcuses, I expect to see you there soon 
There are zero excuses left 
I understand both sides of the discussion here, but I don't know whether it's very interesting to continue. Sure it's possible that a program written in C++ is perfectly safe, but we all like rust to give us more guarantees from the get go.
Sure, you start a company just to deal with the legal hurdles, and you don't intend to make a profit, but ten years down the line, your life has changed, you have moved on and frankly, it's nice to change the thing you're looking at all day long every ten years, and then there is this company offering you a 7 digit number.
Frankly it's always tempting, and github, which I think is a major enabler for open source since it's creation, is now owned by microsoft. A company which in my old-school memory is synonym for closed source. Just reading the wording in that communiqué gives me the creepes to be honest and has spiked my interest in alternatives. It's not about judging intentions, just let's not be naive. (or closer to home, do you realize how much mozilla earned by making google search the first thing you see when you open firefox).
Choosing a not-for profit organisation might inspire more of a "I step down, others step up" workflow. It might be more complicated though, I know where I am, you need at least 2 people to sign up for an organisation, but you can create a company all alone. And intentions might be the same (and those 2 people must be willing to be legally responsible for decisions made/finances).
On the other hand, if I mentor on exercism, I feel my effort goes mainly to the users, and not to the "company". I can help others who can enroll for free, and when company policy changes, I can stop participating.
Hello - Exercism co-founder here 
I'd like to add some clarity to things. Firstly, Exercism is a not-for-profit company registered in the UK with company number 11733062. The company is a "Private Limited Company by guarantee without share capital use of 'Limited' exemption". For those not familiar with UK Company Law, this means that the company has no shareholders, the company cannot be sold, and any assets can only be given to other companies with the same aims and status. We have two trustees, Katrina Owen and myself, who are also Directors of the company.
The site is funded primarily by the founders (we've spent over $200k on Exercism since it started). We are also starting to look for grant funding, such as the Mozilla Grant we got earlier this year, which helps people work full-time for periods to speed up Exercism's development. In the future we aim to generate revenue from companies sponsoring tracks on the site. This money will go straight to further development. It is worth noting that the Mozilla grant was conditional on the company being not-for-profit and the money being spent in accordance with that, and us passing their due diligence process.
The previous Delaware corporation was set up to insulate Katrina from the legal side of running Exercism. It is cheaper and easier to set it up as it was than to create a not-for-profit in the US, so that was why it was done that way. It dissolved in February of this year, and the assets moved to the new not-for-profit company. We've slowly been updating everything to reflect this change. I've just pushed through a few PRs to update some of the points that people mentioned above, and you'll see that those references to "Exercism, Inc" have now gone. There are about 100 GitHub repos that make up Exercism and lots of references to change, but we should probably have prioritised that earlier.
On the Rust side of things, it's worth being aware that we're currently reworking the Rust Track as part of the Track Anatomy Project to make it easier and more enjoyable to both learn from and mentor on. In the mean time, we have a big backlog, so thank you to everyone who's come and helped out. We currently have about 8,000 solutions submitted per week across the site, so everyone that helps out chipping away at that iceburg is greatly appreciated!
I'm very happy to answer any questions anyone might have about this, but you'll probably get quickest responses asking by opening an issue at GitHub at exercism/exercism
@iHiD : Thanks for clarifying. I apologize for the FUD above -- I found the Delaware non-501c3 Entity, and did not realize it was just a "shell" for the non-profit UK entity.
@anon80458984 Thank you. It's our fault for not being clear enough about this upfront. We have a load of WIP issues to add a whole section to the site about the Exercism organisation, but we've just not got round to it yet. I'm a big believer in transparency and clarity, and I appreciate you challenging things to ensure that all is above board, so please don't feel the need to apologise
I hope you don't mind my curiosity, but I just wonder how this works. As far as I can tell, Exercism is a website, github offers free plans, vps costs 5$ a month, and domains, well, maybe 20$ a year, so how does one get to $200k. Do you count your own working hours or have you earned $200k somewhere else and then spent that money to someone else to make exercism possible?
It's just that there is a lot of us out there that work hard to make open source software (and that might include mentoring on exercism) and who have never seen a penny for it.
@najamelan Hello. I don't mind the question
So two ways, general costs and paying people.
In terms of general costs, our monthly costs are somewhere between $700 and $1k/month. I don't have an exact number but it's in that region, so $10k/year. We spend $500/month on AWS then more on things like Slack, Sparkpost, Bugsnag, etc etc. Then there are annual costs for things like accountants etc and other one-off costs, e.g. Katrina was quoted something like $12k for setting the company up as a 501c3 (which is why she don't do it), buying exercism.com cost $1k, etc. Exercism has been around for a decade or so. Costs add up over that time.
Secondly, we pay people to do specific things where they work on Exercism for a fixed amount of days per week for a period . So for example, in 2017, we paid someone for 9 months to do research and product work into the site. We've then paid people to work on specific areas around ops and technical integrations. These people handle things that are the side of Exercism that's not public (things like security, databases, backups, etc). Since September last year we've been paid someone for 3 days per week to work on the Track Anatomy Project. Over the last 2 months we've paid someone to be working on the Automated Mentoring project with the money we got from Mozilla. I'm not prepared to go into how much those people got paid without asking for their permission, but the numbers are like ~25% of what they could get as a "market rate"
Neither Katrina nor I have been paid to work on Exercism so far. Combined we are $200k "down" on Exercism so far. I also sit on the Board of two other not-for-profit companies working with young people and the arts - neither of which I take renumeration for. In terms of where the money comes from, Katrina works at GitHub and I run three other companies as my day job. We've both invest some of that money into Exercism as it's needed it. That's not to say this is a permanent situation - either/both Katrina and I might like to work full time on Exercism, and I think we'd rightly expect to take salaries if we do so (we have to eat!) but we'd be transparent and open with that if we did so, and I'm pretty sure the salaries would be much less than our market-rates. We hope to hire lots of people to work on Exercism over the new few years and the people who have given the most to the community will definitely be on the top of our "head hunting" list if and when we get to that stage
I hope that answers your questions / addresses your concerns.
For the sake of transparency, here are two images to evidence the AWS bill. We're expecting this to double over the next few months as we roll out the automated mentoring project:
Thanks for answering. I didn't at all want you to justify yourself. It's perfectly fine to be able to live of the work one does, and if you really invested so much personal money into exercism, I think it would be entirely justified for you to recover that money if the funds for that would be available.
What it makes me wonder is, I understand that people can get passionate about something and invest personal funds into it, but most people on this planet will not even ever own $200k over our lifetime, and I don't necessariy think it's a healthy situation. If that's what it takes to be passionate about a free and open learning platform and make it actually happen, collectively we have a problem imho.
I'm surely naive. Thanks anyway for creating exercism, I think it's great!
If that’s what it takes to be passionate about a free and open learning platform and make it actually happen, collectively we have a problem imho.
@najamelan Well, its a problem if no-one is willing to spend $200k. It's a solution if people are When you consider equivalent sites such as Codeacademy have taken $47.5M in investment (which suggests it's costing them $10m/year at least to run/advertise) then $200k is actually very cheap. We could make Exercism pretty unbelievably awesome for a tenth of that money!
Regardless, what makes Exercism work is the incredible community of volunteers who create the site and it's content, and mentor others on it, who I am exceptionally grateful for
Looks like it went better this week:
| - New solutions submitted: | 1,172 |
|---|---|
| - Solutions submitted for mentoring: | 332 |
| - Total solutions mentored: | 365 |
| - Current queue length: | 450 |
Quite an influx of new submissions O_o
