[rui314]

I dislike "contact us for pricing" too, but pricing is hard! I don't know how much I should ask for. This is also a bit unusual business model because mold can be used for free. I'm happy if users pay me 10%-20% of the total cost they could save by using mold though.

[ksec]

I sort of wish Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Facebook all contribute $200K each and say hey can you now make Mold MIT or BSD.

[rui314]

$200K is nowadays an annual total compensation of a junior dev. I believe mold values much more than a one year outcome of a typical 5-person junior dev team.

[1f60c]

> $200K is nowadays an annual total compensation of a junior dev

*in the US.

In my country, those salaries are completely unheard of.

[Kerrick]

Not even in most of the U.S. I’ve never broken that salary in the Midwest and I’ve gone from Junior to SWE to Senior to Lead to Manager to Director. Even in total compensation it took me until Director (managing managers who in turn manage individual contributors) to reach that level.

[5e92cb50239222b]

In my country, $200k is what a senior dev makes in 10 years. The issue is, I very much doubt people like Rui could be expected to live in places like mine. So comparing against US salaries is probably what you should do anyway.

[IshKebab]

I'm curious - is that salary difference enough to cause a significant brain drain? Can you hire really good developers for that price in your country?

I live in the UK and dev salaries are maybe half of the US, but people don't leave in droves because there are other factors - family, friends, quality of life, effort of moving your life across continents, etc.

[5e92cb50239222b]

Sure. Significant brain drain might be an understatement — I don't think there are any excellent developers left here (if there were any at all). Anyone half worth their salt either moves to Russia where there was a decent IT sector up until the recent events, or wins a green card/marriage lottery and leaves for the West. FWIW I'm not leaving because I didn't want to live in Russia even before the war started (and even less so now), and I'm not good enough to emigrate to the West.

[ototot]

As I know, Rui was in the US (when he was at Google), so it is a fair statement.

[ksec]

I am sorry I was not trying to undermine the value of Mold. I was told the average / median of Junior Dev are't even $200K in FAANG. But then I dont work in the US so I dont know.

( I hope more US companies are opened to truly remote )

[rui314]

I didn't take it as an offense, so don't say sorry! I just wanted to say that if a senior dev wants to earn $1M in a few years, they can just find a job and do whatever assigned to them there. They didn't have to take a risk of starting a completely new ambitious open-source project to earn that much.

[tiffanyh]

Easiest way to confirm what value it has is to simply charge for it :)

Look at Sidekiq for inspiration on how to charge for open source.

[historia_novae]

Please give a list of companies (Europe/Japan) where I can apply for such a salary. I started working recently and I'm at more than 10 times less than this...

[rui314]

I don’t know much about the European job market, but you can see lots of examples of US job positions and their salaries at websites such as https://www.levels.fyi.

[historia_novae]

I'm not interested in migrating to US for ideological and culinary reasons, but that a very intresting website, thanks!

[forty]

What's wrong with the current agpl license, especially for a linker?

[kevin_thibedeau]

Corporations don't understand the GPL and how isolated, unmodified tools aren't viral.

[vbezhenar]

That sounds strange. Corporations hire enough lawyers to find every possible loophole in tax evasion.

[TingPing]

It's hard to quantify software costs sometimes and just saying avoid copyleft is an easy rule.

[saghm]

Build times are a huge issue impacting how fast I can develop at my job (and I'm fairly certain that's the norm for my team), and I suspect that using a faster linker would mitigate that by a significant chunk. Unfortunately I'm just an IC and don't have the authority to look into something like paying for this, and I'd likely need to actually try it out and show numbers for how much things would improve to get management interested in actually looking into this. Because the project I work on requires interfacing with some cloud services that I can't connect to locally, I would either need to actually build on one of our cloud servers or compile the entire thing locally and copy it over, but I imagine the performance gains from multithreading would not be nearly as great on the 8 cores on my laptop compared to the 64 on my cloud server. I'm a bit hesitant to take initiative and just try this out due to the AGPL license though, since IANAL and I imagine if I tried to get permission for this internally, I'd run into the circular issue that without data to show it's worth it to look into, I'd probably just be told not to do it.

Basically, I think your best chance of generating interest from this is the bottom-up (since the individual engineers are the ones who would be feeling the pain that this could help solve), but I'm not really sure ICs at the companies large enough to be potential customers for this have any likely path forward with the way you've structured things right now. I'm not sure if you're flexible on this at all, and obviously I can't guarantee we'd get anywhere, but if you're interested in hearing more details about the potential use my team (and probably a number of other teams at my company would be able to make use if we were able to work something out), feel free to email me! Any prefix @<my username>.com will forward to my gmail.

[wyldfire]

I was joking and I don't think you need a price on there. But if you're serious, you can put out an asking price and everyone involved should just assume it's negotiable. Just use something like a couple of million USD as a starting point.

> This is also a bit unusual business model because mold can be used for free.

You're selling the copyright, right? That's ok - businesses pay for stuff like this. Although I wonder if instead you'd be better off if you created a corporation and instead offered to sell the company's IP + your commitment to support the work over ~1-2 years. This might be a more common scenario for M&A teams to work with. Especially if you are keen on supporting more target architectures/OSs. Someone like ARM or SiFive or FAANG would easily shell out that kind of money to get mold.