[HN Gopher] The chemfp project: problems selling free software ___________________________________________________________________ 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] ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2020-07-20 23:00 UTC)