[HN Gopher] The chemfp project: problems selling free software
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       The chemfp project: problems selling free software
        
       Author : dalke
       Score  : 25 points
       Date   : 2020-07-20 16:44 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (jcheminf.biomedcentral.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (jcheminf.biomedcentral.com)
        
       | zokier wrote:
       | I think to truly appreciate FOSS as a model, one needs to shift
       | away from thinking software as an asset to be monetized to more
       | of a liability that needs to be managed and maintained. Then the
       | benefit of FOSS becomes clear: by publishing your software there
       | is possibility of sharing that burden with others instead of
       | carrying it alone yourself.
        
       | dalke wrote:
       | I started the chemfp project in part to see if I could develop a
       | self-funded free/open source product in my field,
       | cheminformatics. (In short, storing and searching chemical
       | information on a computer. Chemfp does very fast Jaccard-Tanimoto
       | similarity search for "short"/O(1024 bit) bitstrings.)
       | 
       | The answer: no.
       | 
       | The section I linked to highlights some of the problems I had
       | selling software under the principles of free software. For
       | examples: How do I provide a demo if I always provide MIT
       | licensed source code? Academics expect discounts, but they are
       | also the ones most likely to redistribute the code. Which is not
       | a wrong thing to do! But it affects the economics in a way I
       | could never resolve, compared to proprietary/"software hoarding"
       | licensing models.
       | 
       | As an HN note, I contracted a couple people to help improve the
       | popcount implementations. HN user nkurz developed and tweaked the
       | AVX2 implementation, and proof-read the paper. Thanks nkurz! As a
       | result, chemfp is, I believe, the fastest single-threaded
       | Tanimoto search implementation for CPUs available, and most
       | likely memory bandwidth limited, not CPU limited.
       | 
       | (Note: the mods asked me to repost. My earlier post is at
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23598470 .)
        
         | ssivark wrote:
         | Very interesting experiment.
         | 
         | Did you consider having academics cite your software as an
         | academic work, and then monetizing those citations to get
         | grants from funding agencies who were funding the research that
         | used your software?
         | 
         | Given this knowledge, can you think of other similar
         | experiments worth performing? Alternatively, are there any
         | likely changes that might lead to such approaches becoming more
         | feasible?
         | 
         | I'm quite interested in this question and appreciate your
         | comments. In case you've already answered these in the article,
         | I apologize -- the article is long and the HN thread will
         | likely expire before I have the chance to peruse it thoroughly.
        
         | maximente wrote:
         | in your future ideas section you have listed a few features or
         | directions that the software could go. what about selling
         | those?
         | 
         | in my mind, in order to monetize a greenfields FLOSS project,
         | it seems you need to basically create software so impactful
         | that users are willing to pay for particular features or bug
         | fixes that they need, and that don't already exist in the
         | software. so basically, you have to not only get people to use
         | this new thing, but also get them to be willing to pay for
         | particular improvements to it! quite a task.
         | 
         | this first occurred to me when i heard Stallman talk about how
         | one can monetize FLOSS projects by selling bugfixes or
         | improvements. contrast the typical developer-driven setup where
         | a team implements the feature then sells it by selling a new
         | version, upgrade fee, or what have you.
         | 
         | so it's a tricky situation, in that one needs to offer a
         | compelling product, but not something so good that individuals
         | can take it from the shelf and never have to do anything to it.
         | however, this is sort of helpful insofar as it acts as a way
         | for you to ship something and then - hopefully - let users
         | drive the product (we'd pay $X for a UI on top).
         | 
         | for cheminformatics, i'm not really sure what some killer
         | features are, but you have at least some ideas as potential
         | things to sell. perhaps the community would be interested in
         | pooling together funds for some of those ideas, or a UI/UX, or
         | whatever - but yeah, definitely seems more customer-driven then
         | traditional software.
        
         | [deleted]
        
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