[sjatkins]

The author seems to not know that there is open source in Common Lisp as well as most every other language. Open Source per se is orthogonal to whether Lisp or Language X is a great language to have in one's toolkit.

Clojure mind share is quite low compared to scala as far as languages built on top of the JVM go. Personally I think clojure and clojurescript is pretty cool but not so cool so far as to tempt me away from python, javascript and CL.

For a startup don't even worry about what language your competitors, if any, are using. Simply produce the best product you can and get it to market and break even before you even begin to think about these other things. HINT: in this age there is not one or a few areas and a bunch of competitors but millions of unique cool niche ideas and products. Build a better system for pushing out new app and product ideas consistently on the side. It isn't like the case of web store competitors at all. Also today there is a large market to buy startups that produce some webapp product that grows enough legs to more than break even.

You don't predicate your business on a secret but on producing a good product people want at a price point they are happy to pay. Secrets are hard to keep. Particularly when the author just told us about his secret weapon and advises as many as possible to use the same "secret".

Back in the "old days" we would joke that if we wanted to derail our competition then we should simply give them our source code. Their best geeks would be bemused and befuddled for months. Today we are drowning in reams of "free code" that may or may not be suitable. Then we have a side helping of hundreds of web APIs to pick from for various subparts of a product. So much time is spent understanding and adapting open source and choosing among and massaging our data to use so many external APIs that it is a wonder anything gets done. :P